As Within, So Without

'Tis a strange time to be alive

Ok, disclaimer before you start reading—here are the philosophies that my cognitive model of the world vibes with, and here’s a cheatsheet for you to determine whether you’ll experience resonance in the next few minutes.

// Existentialism – People retreat into abstractions to avoid discomfort. // Process Philosophy - Reality as not a collection of fixed objects, but an ongoing process.
// Depth Psychology – Power, avoidance, and trauma drive external manifestations.
// Social Constructivism – Our collective structures are built on subjective maps. // Daoism - Wuwei, attuning to reality and responding fluidly.
// Advaita Vedanta – Direct experience over mental models.

Ok hi. I don’t know where or when you’re reading this, but I’m writing from March 10th, 2025, in our Potrero office in San Francisco, California. I want to anchor some thoughts in this moment—an entropic regime change era where trad systems are unraveling at a slow, grinding pace while AI accelerates everything else at breakneck speed. When we enter unstable eras, I like to shill my meta-beliefs since they’re more relevant now than ever— which is: what happens outside begins first within the individual. On a meta-level: every policy, structure, and decision is shaped by individuals acting from their internal maps of reality. The external world is, in many ways, an artifact of our inner landscapes. Jung loves this stuff obviously, but if you’re a rationalism-forward Sensing type, maybe hold your feeling of resistance for a little longer since you’ve made it this far.

Every policy, structure, and decision is shaped by individuals acting from their internal maps of reality.

As within, so without. The outside world is fracturing, overwhelmed by competing voices—each proclaiming its own truth, often without regard for the second-order consequences that further divide us. Division, erratic political swings on a macro scale, and the disintegration of our collective narrative are symptoms, not the cause. Beneath this symphony of noise lies a deeper, quieter ache in the collective: the longing to be understood.

At the core of human experience, we all have the desire to love and be loved. Yes, mid and quixotic thesis, but start here. Beneath the division, the psychotic political pendulum swings on the macro level, and beneath the fragmentation of our collective narrative, this fundamental yearning remains.

But love is not simple, nor is it easily sustained.

Conflict cracks open the fault lines within us. When this happens, we retreat into our minds—not outward, but inward, seeking refuge in the comforts of what we know to be Right™. Retreating into our head is a defense from experience, a way to impose order on the disorder of feeling.

We draft narratives, build logical fortresses, and seek intellectual dominance over the discomfort. The refrain becomes familiar: They don’t get how things work. They are wrong. How do they not see?

Developing secure attachment with reality is challenging - it is easier to retreat into the mental scaffolding we have built to make sense of it. These models are not reality itself, but we often forget.

We walk around forgetting that our model of reality is just a model, it is fundamentally incomplete. To stay present with what is, rather than what we assume it to be, so we can witness realities outside of our own— is a premium subscription tier of the human experience, and most of us can’t afford it.

We can’t afford to get into the source code, to see that beneath these rationalizations there lies something much more primal—the body, bracing for impact, shielding an old wound. The wound of not being understood.

Most often, it is easier to bypass the raw, unstructured nature of feeling and move directly to a place where we are insulating ourselves from the ache of being unseen. It is easier to safeguard the wound and build defenses on top of it than it is to treat it.

Kind of a hot take incoming, but the space on top of the wound is a fertile ground from which the pursuit of power is born. The desire for dominance, authority, and unilateral decision-making can be less about what we call ambition, and more about an internal refuge—power offers control over the uncontrollable mess that is reality. If we can command our environment, dictate the terms, and remove uncertainty, then we never have to confront the deep unseen. Who’s there to catch us when we fall into the abyss?

Anxious or avoidant attachment styles emerge from the nervous system’s struggle to cope with the unseen. Some of us build years of our lives insulating from our wounds, some construct personalities, careers, organizations out of callouses against the unknown. We detach or become overly merged with relationships, alliances, and tribes when we become inundated with uncertainty.

Because power is safety.

Relationship breakdowns trace back to the same safety mechanisms: when the body feels unseen, we escape into the mind, seeking control through analysis rather than tuning into what is actually present. If we can’t get the other person to see us, the body senses a familiar danger. We feel unsafe, even when there is no immediate threat present.

The way out is to embody the willingness to feel the discomfort rather than engineer an escape. The antidote to this is presence. Not the distant, calculated presence of analysis, but the raw immediacy of embodiment. To drop out of the head and into the body.

Stepping away from the need to be right, and into the need to be real, is an exercise into the body.

To collaborate with reality and experience what emerges, is an exercise into the body.

When we shift the locus of awareness from imposing order on reality to collaborating with it, we unlock this new subscription tier of the human experience.

Structuring reality from the top down—imposing frameworks, strategies, and narratives to create predictability and mitigate uncertainty, is how we got into our current environment.

In contrast, embodiment is about directly experiencing reality as it unfolds, rather than filtering it through pre-existing constructs.

Presence doesn’t impose a path, it reveals one. A new kind of agency emerges—one that is fluid, attuned, and responsive rather than forceful and defensive. Instead of constructing reality as something to be mastered, we collaborate with it, allowing possibilities to arise that would never exist in a top-down control model.

It is time to reimagine a new world with more embodiment, and more presence.