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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 158 (Oct 22, 2023) — Life Journey, Enneagram Typing, And Then?, & More
Sloww Sunday shares my latest and greatest creations and curations to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding the email version of this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
📘🌀 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
Can you give me an overview of your entire journey so far?
Sure thing! At this point, you’ve probably seen the Sloww Stages infographic. So, let’s look at it from another angle—a chronological perspective.
2007-2014: During the first ~7 years of my marketing/advertising career (2007-2014), I was unconsciously immersed in the rat race: get a job, get promoted, change jobs for more money, upgrade lifestyle, repeat. There wasn’t much (if any) questioning of anything. I was executing the socialization/conditioning of my environment, culture, education, profession, etc. I was a high-achiever whose worth was my work. My identity was my LinkedIn profile, and my energy was focused externally. In 2014, I started the fourth job in my career, but the first one to pay me six figures. I had “made it” in a conventional sense.
2015: In late 2015, I remember going to bed one night at the typical 2am or so after working insane hours (it had been 60-80+ hour weeks for 6 months straight). I just stared at the ceiling of our bedroom, heart racing, not able to fall asleep. A question popped into my head along the lines of, “Am I really here for this short time to kill myself with more work to sell people more stuff they don’t need?” I was the Marketing Director for a well-known apparel/denim brand, but I realized I literally did not care about selling people more clothing. So, you can imagine the dilemma with that question, and the immediate realization that the answer was “No” (which then opened up the next question of, “Well, then what am I here for this short time to do?”). This kicked off 6 weeks of acute, self-diagnosed, existential crisis where I first started spending all my free time asking questions, Google searching everything I could think of, watching videos/documentaries about life/nature, and taking tons of notes (Sloww Stage Support). This is also when I first discovered intentional living and all those related concepts (Sloww Stage 1) which I initially saw as a way out of the insane busyness of my job/career. I had no idea people were intentionally pursuing less/enough as opposed to the keeping up with the Joneses and lifestyle inflation I had been living with the McMansion and sports car.
2016: My crisis didn’t magically “end” after 6 weeks, but you could say it shifted from acute existential crisis to subtle existential angst/anxiety moving forward. Instead of being in the foreground of my life and captivating all my free time, it shifted to the background but continued to be present. Almost exactly a year (late 2016) after the start of my crisis (late 2015), I really started to buckle down and try to find purpose (Sloww Stage 2). I had whiteboard paint walls in the office of our house at the time and completely covered them in notes, adding things, erasing things, etc. I even had the original 4-circle ikigai diagram taped up to the wall before I ever came up with Ikigai 2.0 (which I used to find my own purpose and still recommend to others to this day years later). I still continued working in my job/career during this time.
2017 to mid-2018: I continued questioning and learning in my free time. The new things I was learning grew, while the purposelessness in my job/career also grew. The growing of both of these simultaneously led to what I think was ever-increasing cognitive dissonance (my thinking was drastically changing but my doing of showing up to my same job/career was still the same). Eventually, 2.5 years post-crisis in mid-2018, the cognitive dissonance hit a boiling/breaking point, and I quit my career to give entrepreneurship a shot.
Mid-2018 to today: Even though a lot started and happened in the first 2.5 years, I actually feel like my learning and development really took off over the last 5.5 years since then. One major epiphany was that I thought I had questioned everything during my existential crisis, but I eventually realized I hadn’t questioned the most obvious thing—my own questioning (my own mind)! After all, it’s not like I chose to have an existential crisis. Why did I have a mind that cared more about purpose than money? How did I end up with a mind that allowed me to respond to my crisis positively, productively, and proactively in the first place (Sloww Stage 3)? This is when things started to get really interesting by dissecting my lottery of birth, understanding the subject-object relationship, etc. Big questions arise here (all 🔒Premium posts): What is going on? Is free thinking even possible? Is ultimate moral responsibility a myth? What’s our problem with (mis)attribution of agency? Do you control your life path? Do you live life, or does life live you? Is this the strangest thing in life? Is this the holy shit moment? Ultimately, this led to when I (as subject) was aware of and able to take my mind (as object)—or awakening/self-witnessing (part of Sloww Stage 4). If you haven’t read this recent post yet, it outlines my latest and greatest thinking at this moment: 🔒Behind the Scenes: How I Live with the Lottery of Birth & Lack of Free Will (1 Year Later)
All in all: 🔒The Sloww Stages map to Ego Development Theory surprisingly closely. If the initial question “Am I really here for this short time to kill myself with more work to sell people more stuff they don’t need?” had a simple answer, I wouldn’t still be doing what I’m doing 8 years later. Questioning leads to learning leads to development leads to questioning leads to learning leads to development leads to questioning… At this point, I feel like I’m just pulling on interconnected threads and curiously following them wherever they lead and unfold.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Always ask, “And then?”
I think about the short story of the tourist and the fisherman all the time. Check out the infographic below for something closer to the original version, or watch this short video to get the gist with a modern adaptation. Either way, always ask yourself, “And then?” (it’s like another angle on the five whys).
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Have you tried the Enneagram?
I’ve been seeing mentions of the Enneagram pop up again recently. Two things to know:
- It’s a useful tool for getting to know yourself psychologically. I used the book The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types by Riso & Hudson (Book Summary). I self-assessed myself between Enneagram types 3, 5, & 1 (I think the first 30 years of my life were a 3, this last decade a shift to 5, and a dash of 1 in there).
- The Enneagram is not who you ultimately are: “They can be very helpful for exploring one’s psychological-emotional tendencies, habits, ways of relating. But, understanding the Enneagram doesn’t tell us anything, and is not useful for telling us anything, about our self.” — Rupert Spira (source video)
Bonus: The final page of The Wisdom of the Enneagram covers “the stages of the work”:
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
400+ Mental Immunity Concepts
Want to build “mental immunity” (aka “cognitive/psychological immunity” or “epistemic/memetic immune system”)? I’ve curated 400+ concepts on the second tab of the 🔒Mental Mastery Cheatsheet. I guarantee you haven’t seen all these concepts curated in one place anywhere else or heard of all these before! Like it or not, we are living in a time when awareness and understanding of these concepts is absolutely critical for self-defense and fighting off self-delusion.
Bonus: I also added a new tab that shows you ALL the behind-the-scenes of how I created Mini Mind.
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
Moving from ‘Spiritual Translator’ to ‘Spiritual Transcender’
So far, I’ve read quite a bit from spiritual teachers Rupert Spira, Ramana Maharshi, Douglas Harding, Anthony de Mello, Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Michael Singer, Lao Tzu, Shunryu Suzuki, Jed McKenna, and more. I also plan to read Nisargadatta Maharaj, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Bernadette Roberts, Alan Watts, and many others.
But, what most people don’t realize is that reading spirituality is a psychological act—it’s happening on the level of the mind. When you’re reading from many different authors and spiritual traditions, the interconnecting thread is that it’s one big exercise in “coming to terms” and “creating common ground.” Different spiritual traditions: 1) use different words to mean the same thing, and/or 2) use the same words to mean different things. It’s on you to “translate” and connect the dots. The more you are exposed to, the better you become as a “spiritual translator.”
This is helpful on the level of the mind, but keep in mind (pun intended) that you are always interpreting everything based on your current level of psychological development. Ultimately, it’s all an endless variety of mind stuff pointing beyond mind (the whole “fingers pointing at the moon” thing). So, the “spiritual translator” really is meant to point to the “spiritual transcender” (I’m just making these terms up on the fly, but I think you know what I mean). Think about ways in your own life where you can move from spiritual translator to spiritual transcender.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
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