Do you feel the pressure to BE something?

Do you feel the  pressure to BE something?

We live in a distinctly individualistic culture.

Think about it for a minute. 

Do you define yourself more based on your profession, your accomplishments, or is it your network of family and friends that makes you who you are?

In 2020, Joseph Henrich, Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, published The Weirdest People in the World: How the West became Psychologically Particular and Peculiarly Prosperous. 

WEIRD is an acronym  and stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. He uses the term to refer to people who grew up in modern, western cultures. In his book, he argues that people from WEIRD societies, mainly North America and western Europe, are unusually individualistic and see the world through the lens of self.

In societies like these, children are raised to believe that they alone achieve and accomplish without recognizing the network of human and non-human support that holds them. The challenges they face are also individual, leading them to believe that they are broken in some way and they need to be fixed if they can't or don't achieve the same things as others. Does this resonate? Can you remember your young self? How many of us carry the embodied memory of a relationship where love was conditional, based on what you did rather than simply who you are? 

What would it look like if you valued yourself, simply for who you are, not for what you have or haven’t done? 

As opposed to weird western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic cultures, many traditional social systems are defined by a collective ethic, a community or tribe living and working together. For most of human evolution, we had no choice but to live in groups. Survival depended on cooperation.

Humans living in collective contexts collaborate to hunt animals, to raise children, to find and collect food. It is dangerous or even impossible to complete these tasks alone. Identity is based on kinship networks.

Your resources, fate, day-to-day life are completely connected to the resources, fate, and daily life of your network. In such a society, it is impossible to imagine a situation where one member has more than another, or when one person achieves something without the support of the rest of the group. Everything you do is connected to your context.

One of the most important conclusions of Henrich’s research is that the psychological traits that seem to define human behavior, including defining ourselves based on accomplishments rather than networks, are not universal human traits, even though most psychological studies focus on these western people. These deeply individualistic traits are very specific to western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic cultures.  This makes those cultures actually weird in the literal sense of the word and unrepresentative of humanity as a whole.

In other words,  it is not normal human behavior to operate alone.  

This is a recent development, and leaves most of us literally feeling inhuman, probably more like robots or machines.  

This is why I do the work I do. 

So many of us feel that sense of separation from something larger, as if you literally operate alone, floating in space, unconnected to the web of life that sustains us all.  

Going it alone, even if you might accomplish great things, is not enough for us humans.  We need connection: to other people, to communities, to the web of life that sustains us. 

In western culture, relationships are too often seen as optional or transactional.  The truth is that none of us is meant to walk through life alone. 

Our nervous systems developed in relationship — to others, to fire, to that larger web of life. Healing, growth, resilience all arise through relationship.