"Out of the box" without the thinking

Here is what makes us who we are in any given moment:

Our genes
Our past and the stories about ourselves we tell based on it (identity)
Our current environment

Our genes are already cast, we’re already there, no action needed on this one.

Our past is a matter of interpretation, supports vast changes or perspective and the stories and identity we base on it are a product of… our genes and our past environment.

Therefore the environment of today (combined with the genes we cannot influence) will shape our stories and identity of tomorrow.

So it turns our everything we can do to change our future is all about what we surround ourselves with and how do we react to it. But reacting still comes from our genes and past. You can see where this is going.

A healthy attempt of strategic conscious improvement can only have one direction – Outgoing and one place it happens – The Game of Life. You cannot improve your Game of Self by force and trying can be counterproductive. But you can change your environment and it will do the magic.

Much of this process is subconscious and chaotic, but with a good degree of self-knowledge it’s possible to steer the wheel most of the time. Just don’t aim for full control – it’s impossible.

First we need to swallow our ego and just admit how we’re all massively influenced by our environment, including people around us and culture. Denial won’t help.

Тhe only meaningful plan is to change and improve everything changeable around us. This is an ongoing process as we need different Game of Life situations over time to match our growth opportunities in our Game of Self path.

But the world is such a mess and sometimes we are our best and worst selves in the most unexpected circumstances. Self-knowledge is never complete. How do we construct the best for our progress when we don’t even know ourselves now and both the future us and the world are full of unknowns?

This complex construction is a process greatly enhanced by the power of intuition. The problem is most people either don’t have the intuition developed or suppress it due to Sheep mode. Taking action without a clear reason in your head is scary enough to be blocked by our fears if they happen to be in charge at the moment.

A typical vicious circle many people can fall in is:

Sheep mode -> Fears make us cautious, we need a reason for every action -> Less trust in our intuition as it provides only results, no reasons -> Less intuition, more thinking -> More thinking, less doing -> We end up stuck in deeper Sheep mode -> Even more fears -> Even less intuition -> … -> Negative ruminating hell.

So I’ll just give you a substitute for intuition, a Golden rule that will hold true almost every time. And just like all good rules, it’s very simple and doesn’t require much extra thinking. Let’s go!

There is only one universally good direction in life – outwards.

The good things in life: Love, Freedom, Empathy, Meaning, Hunter mode are all about opening up to the world and its people.
The bad things in life: fears, lack of freedom, lack of meaning, Sheep mode, addiction, anxiety, depression are all about closing into ourselves.

And this is a two-way relationship. Open up and you invite the good, close up and you’re stuck with your worst. But the good also opens you up to more good. “The secret” is not entirely bullshit, the attraction principle is a real thing.

So we need one main thing from our environment – structures that help us open up. But how do we know which are the ones? By their shape.

Humans interact with two distinct structures a lot:

Flow structures – they move things and bring change, like rivers
Box structures – they divide space and obstruct natural flow, like mountains

It takes a powerful river to carve its way though a mountain. It’s better to not have too many mountains around.

The very definition of these structures tells us which are good and bad for us. Flow opens us up. Boxes close us in.

There is no better guiding principle in the whole area of mental health:

Everything good in mental health has a flow structure because it opens our heart and mind. Especially our central flows of love, empathy and meaning.
Everything bad in mental health has a box structure because it closes our heart and mind. Including too much logical thinking!

But why does our brain do so much boxes and thinking if it’s counterproductive?

It’s a long story, first evolutionary and then cultural. The first creatures that evolved a nervous system hundreds of millions of years ago had three core goals in life – survive, eat and reproduce. Some of these goals like finding food and eating required a process-based brain capable of high focus in order to “search and destroy” the food. Other goals like not being eaten by something bigger required a fluid, intuitive brain that had a general awareness about the world and the creature’s place in it.

But nature is harsh and you need to have both functionalities at the same time – you don’t want to be eaten while you’re focused on finding your own prey. So focus and general intuitive awareness have to coexist. And this is how the brain hemispheres evolved. They are both involved in everything we do but their battle for dominance is not conscious (it would have been extremely tiring and confusing).

Early humans had a massive advantage thanks to their highly developed left side of the brain. We invented language, built more and more complex tools and could predict and plan for the future. And all of those abilities were at the start spectacularly bad. But evolution doesn’t give a shit about quality (or… anything actually) it’s a mindless process that just… selects the selected. It can be summed up like this:

If you’re not a loser, you reproduce.

Given enough generations, we slowly improved. Until we gradually took control over the world. And let’s not fool ourselves – we did it in the harsh ways of nature – with violence.

Survival was no longer in question for humanity. But for each individual human it still was. Disease, famine, wars, social struggles meant that for the large majority life was psychically very hard. But challenges can be good for mental health and so is living in tight groups. So mentally people held their ground. And again, thinking was a key for both survival and the slow steps for science and development of the human kind.

But then things changed.

In most of the world life suddenly became physically easier. We fought off disease and hunger and got iPhones instead. Wars are now rare and women and marginalized groups have the best time in recorded history. Almost every real world stat except for the environmental ones is at its best point. Ever. Less violence. More healthcare. More education. More opportunities. More access to information. You name it.

The problem is although it was a actually a mix (you cannot change a world you don’t understand, duh), left brains and boxes took all the credit for the progress. And we subjugated our right brain via our culture and abysmal education system, suppressed our intuition and forgot flows exist. But boxes cannot replace flow. Tinder swiping is not love. A corporation is not a hunting party. An apartment block is not a village. We ended up lonely and have a clear crisis of meaning – one that for-profit social media apps can never fill (not that they really try). We’re not built for this. We need the flows back! And actually we desperately want them back. We are just scared to let go of the boxes that stand in their way.

It’s a chicken-egg problem: We need strong flow to destroy the boxes but they are in the way of any strong flow attempts. So we need to gather all our self-love and desire for freedom, take a deep breath and start with a leap of faith. There is no other way. Baby steps won’t do this one.

The reality of our modern life is that We need and love flows but we Cope with our problems and confusion By inventing boxes. As the overcomplicated world gives us a lot to cope with, it’s tempting to introduce more and more boxes into our lives and become more closed. But if you want to remember just one world from this post, let it be this one. Resist. Every time you feel the urge to put something in a box, Resist. Every time other people and the world impose their box-based thinking unto you, Resist. Each time you do, you get closer to the leap of faith that will turn the tide by letting flows back into your life. And there is no going back from there. Because you’ll love the change.

I promise you, if you do just this one thing, resisting the boxes, every second, everything else in life just falls into place. Every wise advice you have ever heard is just an extension of living without boxes. All the pillars of happiness – living in the present, forgoing your ego, not chasing dopamine experiences, focus and give it all, the search for meaning – every single one of those is about prioritizing your natural flow over some box(es).

The boxes make you weak and unhappy. You need flows, even if they bring chaos to your life. No matter the identity story you tell yourself, I’m sure you want to be strong and happy. And you have to do just one thing, although very scary…

Live a life without boxes!

What do I have to give up to live outside the box?

Nothing that you cannot live without! All the true value in life is carried by the flows. Boxes just do their box thing and get in the way.

The flows in our mind:
Love, energy, creativity, curiosity, unobstructed time, nature, spirituality.

The boxes in our mind:
All internal and external Categories and Labels, goals, plans, time slots, the boxes we live in, rules and dogma. All numbers.

Still in denial, fan of boxes? The examples how they fail are endless.

Intuition vs thinking:

Intuition is a flow process. This is why it’s powerful, yet harmless.
Logical thinking is a box process. This is why it’s exhausting, prone to errors and potentially harmful.

Entrepreneurship vs a day job:

Entrepreneurship is a flow structure with progress in high regard – good for your mental health.
Most day jobs are box structures with stability in high regard – bad for your mental health.

How to help the marginalized:

Respect and empathy are flows and can never backfire.
Identity politics is based on boxes and can screw up even the best intentions.

There also some fascinating mixed examples:

Stories are so powerful because they connect box structures into a flow, being an unique hack into our minds that loves flows.

Higher love is so powerful and magical because it turns a box (another person) into a flow (the feeling of the other person being a part of you).

Interestingly the concept of money is a flow structure improving a box-dominated ecosystem 🙂 This is why I actually like it. But in order for it to work for everyone, you should like and understand it too.

Long term success (which we measure in long term freedom) is what Simon Sinek calls “an infinite game” – unknown rules and the goal is to continue playing forever, there is no clear win. It’s a flow structure.

Long term happiness is also a flow structure – a way of life more than anything specific. Individual events (boxes) cannot sustain long term happiness.

Constructing the best environment is much easier than you think. You just need to be able to tell a box from a flow. They are so different from one another that this should be doable for anyone without external help.

Everything in your environment that can be a flow, better be a flow.
Every box you can remove from your life and your mind, just remove it.

We only accept boxes when they serve a specific, short term purpose as part of processes:

No more labels unless needed for a process.
No more goals unless needed for a process.
No more plans unless needed for a process.
No more rules other than basic ethics.

Your life is one whole. Your love, meaning, friends, fun and work can all be one beautiful intertwined mess. Trust me, the small inconveniences will be far outmatched by the huge energy and motivation resulting from not mentally dividing yourself into pieces. Who could ever think this was a good idea in the first place?

The boxes in your mind are bad for you and don’t reflect reality. But in order to remove them from your mind, you need to also remove them from your life.

Other people’s lives are also one whole.

In many ways the world is one whole. Or at least should be. If this is something you want…
The change starts with you. Also share this post with people trapped in boxes 🙂

OK, I want a life out of the box. Now what?

To construct the best current and future experiences for positive change, you need to;

Know how a human functions in general
Know how you’re different from other humans
Know all the options the world offers, including out of the box ones

How humans work in general.

You share more than 99% of your genes with your fellow humans. Trust me, we’re much more the same than we are different. The reason we seem different is that we are much more engaged in activities that showcase our differences (eg. thinking) than in natural activities we react similarly to. Here we’ll focus on those.

Humans evolved to live in nature, not in boxes. Most people no dot spend enough time in nature and thus miss on a lot of physical and psychological benefits directly baked into our biology.

Humans are meant to move a lot. If you live a stationary lifestyle you can to compensate with a lot of sports, the more exhausting yet fun ones, the better. I play soccer, tennis and squash.

Humans are social creatures and need socializing in person. Screen socializing is a trade-off compared to the real thing. So meet people.

Humans are easily influenced by their peers so surround yourself with the best people you can find. You should have a floor requirement for legacy peers (such as family and childhood friends) and a much higher one for new peers.

If someone around you is consistently toxic, you have the full right to kick them out of your life, even if it is your spouse, sibling or parent. There is only one ultimate responsibility in life and it’s for creatures that cannot take care of themselves – children, pets and people with severe health problems that have no one else to turn to.

Healthy grown ups have to earn each other’s attention by not being assholes. Nothing should be taken for granted.

How about our criteria for new peers?

We can make a long “box checklist” but I’ll instead use this great simplification that uses emotional flows rather than thinking: