(2019-04-05) Rao Life Spirit Distillation

Venkatesh Rao: Life Spirit Distillation. Personal growth is a bad frame (framing) for thinking about your life. Here is an alternative: life intensification.

The alternative to "growth" (personal development) is not stasis or passivity (acting dead), but a growing aliveness to the actual change that you're undergoing in the process of generating responses to specific life challenges. If these challenges are real, then the way you change through responding to them is not entirely within your control

Life intensification is the process of consciously becoming increasingly real (and no, I'm not talking about being more "present" so don't jump to that conclusion) by letting go more and more of your idea of what your life should be like, and embracing the possibilities of what it is actually turning out to be like.

at 14, you're something like a ghost: a cloud of potential

Ghosts have no moral life because they have no life.

"Growth" fixation makes you less alive to the realities and possibilities of what's actually happening

If you are attached to the idea of being a classical musician, but accidentally discover along the way that you have more of a talent for simplistic ad jingles, you cannot unknow that.

Your choice at that moment of self-knowledge is to either use it to intensify your life and become more alive (going into advertising) or rejecting it in favor of continued ghostliness.

"Personal growth" often encourages rejection of the more intense self because it does not conform to a preconceived plan for "growth."

"Self-actualization" is always about life intensification and moral clothing choices. It is rarely about esteem, belonging, security, or physiological needs (though it can often masquerade as those).

This disease of ghostly, not-quite-here lives has actually gotten more challenging to navigate as the world has gotten more complicated. The more complex the environment, the easier it is to reject opportunities for life intensification as distractions from some anemic notion of "growth" you're attached to.

Aspirations have gotten more complex, but less ambitious.

What does lead to progressive intensification is recognizing the growing serendipity in the environment, and rapidly increasing potential for more imaginative solutions to life challenges, with more intense and unexpected rebirths, all around. It is about living life in a way that you might run into versions of yourself you didn't know were possible.


Edited:    |       |    Search Twitter for discussion