Category: Essays

Cultivating Our Cognitive Advantage: Part II
Part II — The Social Imperative: Cognition and Society Are Interdependent

A three part series on how a biological ecology becomes coherent at scale and how we should then live.

Humans have evolved around an oddly expensive developmental strategy: a large, plastic brain that takes a long time to become reliably functional. In biology, the pattern tends to be that a long childhood, requiring protection, nourishment, and learning opportunities, is bundled with sociality. Notable exceptions clarify the ecological conditions under which long development can be less social. The leatherback turtle and greenland shark live in ecosystems and have traits that both facilitate if not support slow growth and solitary development. Even orangutans, that are somehow in between solitary and social development, interact socially as needed but live mostly alone, likely due to very dispersed food sources. The intricate pattern is relatively consistent: a long developmental arc comes coupled with sociality. The question is what conditions make this strategy viable?

Humans have evolved around an oddly expensive developmental strategy: a large, plastic brain that takes a long time to become reliably functional. Childhood is costly; its evolution didn’t happen overnight. It was a risk that must’ve proved stable enough for it to have survived. Simultaneous to its evolution developed the ecosystem that sustains it, society.

The general answer may be that complexity, in the right conditions and with the right constraints, affords more advanced viable solutions for continued existence. It’s obvious that a long, resource intensive developmental arc interdependent with sociality is a luxury, not for all species. The more viable solutions it provides come in the form of cognition. In the case of humans, the interdependence with society means that higher-levels of cognition provide, facilitate, and depend on societies of more nuanced complexity, creating an iterative, mutually developmental ecosystem. While humans are not alone in having a long road to adulthood facilitated by a society, they are unusual in the complexity of that development, its corresponding society, and the potential afforded by both.

The costly strategy of a long childhood requiring protection, instruction, and shared knowledge, becomes an advantage when a community turns danger into knowledge. In a world of predators, the real power is learning together.

The second part of the answer is proposed by theories that describe how complexity, while a luxury and “fragile,” is often a byproduct of existence. Stephen Jay Gould proposed a “Left Wall” that represents the minimum level of complexity for life to exist at all. Most life tends to stay near this wall. Since life involves growth and mutation some organisms have followed a random “walk” away from it into a “right” tail of higher complexity. The same general arc has been observed in other spheres. The “Mineral Evolution” theory proposed by Robert Hazen argues that the Earth began with only about 12 species of minerals. Today there are over 5,000. A large portion of this “geological complexity” was actually triggered by the rise of life (the Great Oxidation Event – to which we were all apparently invited), showing that these realms are deeply interconnected. It is important to not take this effect too far. If complexity were a “law” of nature for all species, we would be having deeper, two way conversations with our pets, and bacteria wouldn’t be the most prolific organism on the planet.

The Law of Increasing Functional Information seems to sum up this process well without imposing a deterministic plan, a teleological direction, or forgetting that complexity is still a “luxury” (not for every species). Essentially, this theory suggests that complexity isn’t “destined,” but is common in any system where different configurations are tested and the ones that “work” (for stability or reproduction) are kept. It’s a helpful refinement of the thought of complexity because it doesn’t define complexity as complexity for its own sake; existence is not a hoarder. But that complexity develops when it works, providing stability and being replicable. This is relevant to humans as it supports the point made in part 1: we evolved as a unified whole, a layered self-contained ecosystem with biological infrastructures that enable fast, impulse systems and higher-level cognition. The system is elegant and time tested, while still in long-term development. Our layered internal ecosystem is not a machine but a complex interdependent set of dynamic elements and states that require respectful stewardship to function well. In turn this internal ecosystem is interdependent with a social ecosystem requiring the same attention, care for sustainability as well as development into its full potential.

This existence evolved without intention or plan, but that doesn’t mean that there is no optimal state, a range of conditions under which the system functions well. It also means that there is no “mistake.” The long, rigorous feedback loop of evolution results in stress-tested, stable systems. Persistently unstable systems don’t persist. Complexity however, tends to introduce fragility. But it is important to use this term in context. Human existence, interdependent with society, may seem “fragile” compared to the existence of bacteria. But it is resilient, adaptive (facilitated by the cognition it enables), and has demonstrated a capacity for continued development. If we were to infer any absolute morality in such an existence, it would be between stewardship vs abuse. Abuse undermines stability as well as optimal functionality. Stewardship – acknowledging the reality of human capacity, potential, actual need, and the actual environment – seeks coherent harmony with all the factors to facilitate as optimal an existence as possible.

Extraction without constraints converts short-term gain into long-term debt.

Constraints are not the enemy of progress. They are what make progress durable.

The particular factors of human potential and need are higher-level cognition and sociality. Conceptual thinking is a pronounced skill within the former. Remarkably early in life, a human is capable of and in fact benefits from conceptual thought, to think in abstractions, manipulate sophisticated language (in comparison to other species), and act within complex social situations. Conceptual thought speeds the kind of learning that humans excel at as well as its retention. It’s one thing to learn how to do something, like cook a meal. Simple activities can be facilitated by rote memorization if the thing being learned is relatively consistent each time you do it. But what humans are capable of that also helps speed learning is to understand the concept of the thing. In the case of cooking, this could be the concept of heat, certain ingredients, flavors, and utensils. With this information, humans at early ages and even novice levels have consistently demonstrated noteworthy abilities to extrapolate the concepts and apply them practically in other contexts and combinations. In fact, this is considered a common marker of learning.

The Child as Alchemist: Our evolutionary advantage is our capacity for conceptual thinking. Following steps is one thing, but the human mind can see concepts then apply those to other contexts. Combining conceptual with procedural skill instruction, speeds and enhances mastery. Ignoring this capacity, especially in educational and professional spheres, is like having a race car you only take out to buy groceries.

This higher-level cognition, nor its capacity to recruit impulses, does not mature without structured development. It requires sustained feedback, correction, modeling, and shared attention, the steady calibration a solitary environment cannot easily provide. Also, as it matures, it depends on society in which to operate and continue to develop. Cognitive stagnation does not appear to be conducive to human wellbeing. Cognition and society are mutually stabilizing while fostering mutual nuanced development. The point is not that individuals cannot think alone, but that the kind of cognition that can track complex reality, updates, and coordinates under constraint is trained and reinforced inside a social environment that can provide repeated, structured learning across time. In a fundamental sense, society in some form is a biological imperative for us.

This is also why society is not the same thing as a crowd. A herd can be an aggregation, bodies near bodies for protection or convenience. A society, in the sense that matters here, is an ecosystem of complex coordination: people cooperating across time through shared norms, cumulative teaching, and the storage of knowledge outside any one mind. When that exists, cognition becomes more than private cleverness. It becomes collective problem solving, distributed competence, and the ability to manage shared constraints through coordinated action rather than through isolated improvisation. From a biological perspective, society forms the foundational “purpose” of each individual’s existence in a state of fluid interdependence. In an efficient framework, your unique way of making meaning, your skills, interests, and quirks will facilitate your contribution to your group, forming a large part of what makes life “meaningful” to the biology of your mind.

Human development and existence is ecological: layered within, cultivated without. It requires respect, authenticity, and responsibility for proper stewardship.

A community is a role-differentiated coordination system with reliable handoffs and shared norms. Role differentiation is necessary but not sufficient: it can exist in arrangements that are coercive or extractive, where the “handoffs” serve power rather than coordination. The distinction is whether roles are organized to support reciprocity, error-correction, and mutual dependence in a way that stabilizes learning and cooperation over time. In a functioning community, roles are not static identities carved into stone. They are adaptive and revisable as people grow, contexts change, responsibilities rotate, and new needs create new forms of contribution. Individuals do not merely “join” society; they develop a distinctive way of making meaning within it, a cognitive identity that shapes what roles they can inhabit well and how they strengthen the whole through their particular constraints, sensitivities, and skills.

Institutions are the durable scaffolds of this ecology. Institutions are not cognition, but they are externalized cognition: collective memory and coordination technology, such as laws, norms, infrastructure, accounting systems, public health systems, and education systems. At their best, they stabilize cooperation, reduce unnecessary conflict, and protect the long developmental runway that advanced cognition requires. When they fail, the correct diagnosis is not that society is irrelevant, but that the scaffolding is misdesigned, captured, or miscalibrated to reality. Part III will argue that the modern world has made coordination at scale materially feasible while also making failure at scale far more consequential, especially when institutions are shaped by chronic defensive postures or extraction incentives that degrade the very social substrate they depend on.

If humans are a layered internal ecology whose higher cognition develops and functions best inside a social habitat, then society is not a backdrop to “real life.” It is the developmental environment that real life requires. The practical implication is not utopia, and it is not sentimentality. It is stewardship: designing our local communities and our institutions to protect the long runway of human development, to make roles adaptive rather than rigid, and to treat diversity as a coordination asset instead of a management problem. We already possess tools – measurement, communication, education, and systems design – that can scale this kind of coherence, but only if we stop treating people as crowds to be controlled and start treating society as an ecosystem to be kept healthy. Part III will take that claim into the modern world, where coordination at scale is finally feasible, and where incoherence at scale is no longer a private cost.

Building on what small-scale human groups did well: clear role differentiation, mutual accountability, shared purpose, and tight social feedback; we can design modern local communities that meet our biological needs while handling far greater complexity.

With modern conceptual tools and an increased capacity to manage complexity, we can design contemporary local communities that preserve those structural strengths while adapting to present realities.

The aim is not nostalgia or perfection. It is coherence: communities that diversify roles, adjust dynamically to changing conditions, and support stable, long-term wellbeing

27 · February · 2026
Neurodivergence: Responsibility and Opportunity
Clinical meaning, personal responsibility, and the practice of deliberate skill.
Neurodivergence is not an excuse.
It’s not an identity.
It’s not a diagnosis.
On its own, out of context, it’s even a poor explanation.

The Facts

Neurodivergence was coined in the early nineties for the purposes of advocacy for individuals diagnosed with and navigating the autism spectrum. It was meant to build bridges of understanding. To work, these bridges need to go both ways.

Neurodivergence is a term that was intended to build bridges of advocacy and understanding. It requires effort from both sides, the neurodivergent individual working to develop and deploy strategies of executive-function and the support side supporting the scaffolding to maintain the stability and development. Both benefit.

Neurodivergence now encompasses and attempts to describe a set of developmental conditions; the most well documented are Autism Spectrum Condition and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Condition. I use condition rather than disorder to keep the focus on support and functioning rather than defect. Both conditions are neurodevelopmental, meaning they arise from the way the brain builds itself during early gestation and childhood. Included in this nebula of conditions are basic functions and skills typically supported by prefrontal–parietal control networks: the ability to plan, organize, shift attention, and regulate emotions. These may include dyslexia, conditions that may affect learning, as well as some that appear as persistent behavioral challenges.

There are well-developed and continually improving ways of diagnosing these conditions, especially now in what appears to be an age of neural awareness. Many reading the basic symptoms that a diagnosis of any of these conditions attempts to measure may recognize themselves. This is simply because of a few facts:
- No one develops into adulthood perfectly, and many people will recognize some of these symptoms, especially under stress.
- Diagnosis is not based on symptoms being present, but on their intensity and persistence over time.
- Diagnosis is typically pursued when those symptoms impair daily functioning enough to warrant clinical support and accommodations, not as a way to define identity.
Using it to self-diagnose is tricky. In the case of these particular conditions, it requires informed, careful observation over time at the very least.

Diagnosis, especially in these cases of neurodevelopmental conditions, is a form of triage. That means its purpose is to signal immediate action to stabilize a patient. In the clinical setting, diagnosis treats impairment as something to address. It is rightly a very serious and useful tool.

Diagnosis, especially in the case of these conditions, may be triggered when symptoms persistently impair daily functioning to a severity that signals a response that rallys resources to stabilize the individual. Diagnosis plays a crucial role that demands respect and care.

The Responsibility

If the condition is impairing daily functioning, causing notable challenges to baseline quality of life, or even blocking you from goals, then the diagnosis helps rally intervention in the form of pharmacology and therapy for stabilizing your experience of the condition. From there the real work begins: developing and deploying strategies that support a sustainable baseline of wellbeing for you and your community. The term neurodivergence is then a tool for strategically building collaborations for both individual and collective wellbeing and growth. Obviously, claiming neurodivergence as a self-diagnosis is therefore a call to action for oneself.

Without taking that action, claiming the term alone is at least self-defeating if not worse. It’s counterproductive to the intention of the term being coined in the first place. First of all, it’s an umbrella term and alone can signify many diverse conditions. So using it without doing the work of understanding what it means specifically in your case, how to deploy strategies for your own stability, and getting the clinical help you need is unhelpful and can be an abdication of responsibility by treating the label as an endpoint.

The intention of the term neurodivergence was to shift awareness of the specific conditions it describes from “brokenness” to “natural variation.” So it does not absolve the person with the condition of responsibility. Just the opposite. As much as possible, the individual now has the beginning of a framework to work on their own practice of their health first.

Some people are genuinely blocked from assessment and care by cost, waitlists, or geography; my critique is aimed at treating the label as a substitute for the work of support and strategy, not at those navigating access barriers.

Important Aside
I love the fact that my brain works the way it does, most times.

When it seems it isn’t working, it’s hell.
The fragility of emotional stability is particularity frustrating. It seems that I live with a baseline of anxiety that sometimes is background noise and sometimes threatens to drown me.

Although I’ve developed how to set up environments and lifestyles that leverage my particular brain infrastructures for my wellbeing, it’s not easy. I exhaust myself. Shame seems to be more if a constant than anything else. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
That’s why I wrote this article.

The term neurodivergence signals a grave opportunity, both terrible and fantastic in it’s potential. If we build social structures around a respect for neurodivergence (just respect in general would be a great start), we can recruit it to our benefit. It can support communities of mindfully wellbeing, treating the brain as a garden to tend, not a machine to fix.

The Opportunity

The real work mentioned above is actually the work of every individual (specifically developing executive-function skills deliberately). However, if neurodivergence describes a natural variation and not a brokenness, then it also may present the individual with developmental opportunities. The individual, through understanding their specific neural infrastructure, may be able to hone the experience of it for great benefit similar to the way an athlete trains their body for a particular sport.

For a (non-scientific) example, consider any X-Men film. A mutation that later in the narrative becomes a “superpower” tends to start off as a liability. It is only through hard work, support from a knowledgeable community, and some tech/pharmacology (as well as outfits – fashion as a tool for mental health) that the capacity stabilizes and then can be recruited for great benefit.

For everyone, regardless of diagnosis, the deliberate stabilization work many neurodivergent people must do is broadly relevant. Many conditions gathered under the umbrella involve persistent challenges with attention, planning, regulation, and other executive functions, so wellbeing often depends on strategies that make those capacities reliable in practice. This frequently means “externalizing the brain”: using environment, cues, routines, and supportive relationships to offload demands that cannot be consistently carried internally. Because this work has to be explicit rather than assumed, it makes the underlying skills visible for everyone (reflecting the intent of the term neurodivergence). These strategies are not merely accommodations; they are durable practices of human functioning that everyone benefits from learning consciously over a lifetime.

The Bottom Line

Neurodivergence is a helpful call to action first to the person it describes. It can facilitate the sometimes hard but essential work to develop sustainable, quality lives for themselves and their communities. As a neurodivergent individual pursues the practical and sustainable work of their own wellbeing, the term can be used to help build bridges of understanding and even solicit strategic action for shared benefit.

For some, the impairment is far more serious, comprehensive and consistent. Their participation in society is substantially undermined, if not entirely blocked. Additionally, their conditions may be combined with others that are as severe. These individuals deserve our respect and care. For them the term can be a form of grace and part of a support structure they absolutely need. Another reason to use it sparingly.

Neurodivergence is not brokenness. But using the term without pursuing appropriate support and strategies can inadvertently re-install a narrative of brokenness, shifting the practical costs of that inaction onto the people around you. The term neurodivergence must exist in a larger, actionable framework so that it actually achieves the wellbeing and collaboration it intended. It should signal agency and at least possibility to stabilize and grow, not a free pass.

Above all, neurodivergence signals a serious, wonderful, and important opportunity.

The Caveats

Treatment

Obviously, treatment, especially in countries where healthcare is a commodity not a basic human right, can be difficult. There are however numerous resources available online and IRL that can help. This critique is directed at those who irresponsibly use the term. It should be used strategically with awareness, humility, and respect as those responses are what it is intended to build.

Pharmacology & Strategies

Pharmacology in this sphere cures little to nothing. A neurodevelopmental condition is similar to a physical condition. It is unlikely you can grow back what was pruned, never grew, or grew differently in the first place. However, the right pharmacology with the right observant, objective specialist can be incredibly helpful towards creating a baseline of wellbeing. The pharmacology works best when paired with strategies that become habits and resources for stability and growth. There is no magic pill.

Pharmacological responses are serious. They tend to come with side-effects that also must be managed strategically. You may choose not to take them. Whatever you do, do it with calm awareness, not fear. In any case, changing diet, creating helpful routines, and other strategies are essential as well as belonging to a tight community of awareness and humility respectfully dedicated to the wellbeing of each individual. The point is that there will always be rewarding work involved.

Social Norms and Processes

I wrote above how a diagnosis is triage, intended to stabilize a patient experiencing notable impairment of wellbeing in regular functions. The very definitions of impairment and function are dependent on what society in general determines they are. In the right circumstances a person with notable neurodivergence may not experience impaired wellbeing and even excel.

Our present problem is that we’ve dismantled real community in our modern lives and expect humans to live as operationally self-contained individuals. A community is a role-differentiated coordination system with reliable handoffs and shared norms. In a healthy community, roles are flexible and evolve with people and circumstances. As individuals grow, they develop a distinctive way of making meaning that shapes which roles they fit and how their particular constraints and strengths can contribute to the whole. Diversity is biological: Just as biodiversity is necessary for an ecosystem, cognitive diversity is a natural part of the human genome. Ignoring diversity undermines daily baseline functioning and dismisses developmental opportunity on both the individual and collective level (see DIVERGENTE).

The awareness and collaboration provided by building bridges of understanding together contains profound potential benefits for all.

Additionally, we presently live in a global social situation (distraction economy, communication systems full of noise, a social contract that requires outsized productivity, and more) that exacerbates the conditions encompassed by the term neurodivergence. The result is that everyone is displaying symptoms and experiencing a baseline of anxiety that is not helpful. Again, on the individual level the strategies mentioned to develop the executive-function skills are crucial to all. On the social level, we are in need of transformation across domains that demonstrates coherent stewardship of human society and living, not extraction and short term gain for a few (see Cultivating Our Cognitive Advantage).

When diagnosis, strategies, and community work together, the results can be extraordinary to everyone’s wellbeing.

At ARTESIAN we are dedicated to human development and wellbeing. Specifically for those navigating a diagnosis within the neurodivergent umbrella we have developed various tools and processes. You can check them out here: The Neurodivergent Protocol.

If you have any questions or wish to know more about our work and opportunities for collaboration, email us at driven @ artesian.life.
18 · February · 2026
Cultivating Our Cognitive Advantage: Part I
Part 1 – Coherence: Humankind's Advantage and Developmental Imperative

A three part series on how a biological ecology becomes coherent at scale.

Human beings are not the only species who evolved intelligence, social bonds, or even sophisticated cooperation. In humans, however, these traits have become far more extensively elaborated, including especially sophisticated language capacity and higher-order problem solving coupled with metacognition. The latter combination facilitates our ability to model reality, reflect on our own thinking, revise beliefs, teach deliberately, coordinate with strangers, and build systems that outlast any individual.

Humans are a late bloom on an ancient evolutionary tree, facing many of the same basic life tasks as other species, but meeting them through species-specific biological infrastructures. In our case, we also meet them through cognition and culture that substantially shape the meaning of the same elemental demands. Evolution, through a very long and multifaceted process, resulted in a layered organism. Among our reflective thinking infrastructures and processes sit faster systems that help keep bodies alive and groups intact: impulses for food, rest, sex, bonding, status, and threat detection. These are not remnants of earlier evolutionary stages, but crucial elements of our being. These systems remain highly effective when deployed in acute, time-pressured situations, but they become costly defaults in many modern contexts, especially when they push action without deliberation (e.g., threat responses in non-threatening social settings). Above all, we can see their intrinsic and developmental value wherever humans train performance: sport, intimacy, art. The goal in those activities is not to erase impulse entirely, but to shape it into capacity.

It is not a failure to have impulses. The failure is poor integration: when a threat or appetite system rushes behavior without being shaped by higher-level context and developed calibration, outcomes degrade in predictable ways. This is especially true in contexts that require deliberation and coordination. In humans, these impulse systems are a part of a single organism-level ecology, integrated across timescales, where higher cognition coordinates and trains faster responses rather than replacing them. What is distinctive in the human lineage is not the disappearance of these infrastructures, but the expansion of executive capacity: more ability to shape reflexes, represent longer timelines, compare options, and revise behavior based on consequences and feedback. Our potential is not in erasing these impulses, but in the opposite direction, refining and enhancing them to create even higher quality opportunities for human life.

While each human obviously is one organism, the complexity invites us to also consider the human being as a contained ecosystem. We are invited not to manage ourselves as machines but steward ourselves as we would a garden. We do however exist in a greater ecosystem, society, which is interdependent with our biology.

I refer to this capacity as coherence: the adaptive coordination of many interacting needs and signals, across time, using feedback to stay aligned with reality to act and grow. At the individual level, coherence is what it looks like when a person can notice an impulse, interpret it in context, and choose an action that serves both immediate functioning and longer-term stability. At its best this is not merely to navigate an impulse, but to deftly channel it for growth. It means that the person can hone and train this impulse as a raw capacity for notable developmental achievements. We continue to demonstrate developmental capacity across our biological infrastructures (physical, cognitive, and connective/social) with meaningfully open-ended expansion. At the collective level, the same logic applies: societies are ecosystems that either scaffold this capacity, through norms and mutual respect, education, institutions, and distributed responsibility, or they degrade it by rewarding short-term reflexes that destabilize the whole system.

We prove conceptual thinking and social coherence stewardship and coordination in many contexts. We have the capacity, we simply have failed to build conceptual thinking (which in my definition includes taking action) and its development explicitly into our social norms and values as a baseline.

Our distinguishing advantage is the capacity to steward all our systems using higher-level cognition developed in social scaffolding. We can and need to scale this cognitive capacity deliberately, but only if we practice a specific kind of higher-level cognition I call conceptual thinking: the capacity to form and revise models of how things relate (constraints, trade-offs, causal links) so we can hold complexity without collapse and act with relevance rather than reaction. This trainable skill not only facilitates learning from an early age, it makes coherence possible.* The resources and clues for this coherent stewardship and development are provided to us in our biology: the need to channel, enjoy, and develop our own impulses and the reward they can provide when harmonized across our living; our capacity to manage and enhance these processes to our benefit and participation in community; and the need for a healthy society, built on mutual respect, collaboration, and shared goals of stability and growth. When we attend to our biology and capacity with authenticity, navigating the complexity of our existence for our wellbeing, we immediately affect those around us for the better as well. Our existences are interdependent and our individual wellbeing correlates to our society’s wellbeing. Our human advantage also means that we are not in this work of development alone.

Humans have unusually long developmental periods requiring deliberate scaffolding by our community. This is an advantage that allows us to develop our cognitive potential individually and collectively.

*We can and should teach conceptual thinking systematically and explicitly from an early age and dedicate ourselves to its practice throughout adulthood.

ARTESIAN is dedicated to developing conceptual thinking capacity across ages. For example, we believe in starting early as, in addition to the abilities it can provide with experience, it facilitates learning and retention across domains. To that end we’re developing Story Builder, a tool for parents we collaborate with to develop the learning and confidence of their children.

Contact us if you are interested in learning more about other collaboration opportunities including those for adults, professionals, and artists.

A summary of this article is on Substack

Series Addendum: Why these words, why this framing

Why I try to avoid certain terms “control,” “mechanism,” “drives,” “govern,” “regulate”:

Those terms aren’t “wrong.” They’re often technically accurate. The problem is that they suggest a machine metaphor. These words inadvertently suggest a mechanistic approach of the human organism: it is made of “parts” like a machine. In practice, that framing can lead to misinterpretations of the infrastructures and processes they enable. It may lead to attempts to “control” through repression, treating impulses as enemies, rather than integration and training. In this series I’m aiming for a different default picture: the whole person as a contained ecosystem (I do state in this particular essay how societies are human ecosystems as well). Ecosystems aren’t “controlled” so much as stewarded: you work with feedback, constraints, and trade-offs. The goal is not silencing parts of ourselves, but coordinating them across all the systems so they contribute to stability, development, and real-world functioning. For an example see: Rethinking Maslow.

The deeper point is practical: if we describe ourselves as mechanisms to be controlled, on the social scale we often build policies and institutions that reward short-term reflex. If we describe ourselves as an ecosystem (within the greater ecosystem of society) to be stewarded, we make room for training, feedback, and development, personally and socially.

Why calling a system “survival” may distort our thinking:

When we label certain processes and functions of human biology as “survival,” it can quietly imply a hierarchy of importance or evolutionary “priority,” as if evolution built a basic layer, then moved on to “higher” upgrades. That invites teleology (“built for X”) and determinism (“therefore must dominate”). Assuming that these impulse systems developed first or are hold overs, and possibly even conflict with our cognition, tends to diminish their relevance and potential as well as create a narrative difficult to defend. A more accurate framing is contextual and ecological: many fast impulse “systems” may be widely observed across species, but in the human organism they operate within a very different developmental environment, especially a long childhood and dense social scaffolding. Also, this naming may suggest that evolution “created” these systems then later went on to create others, inadvertently leaving these “primordial” systems in the mix. However, the process of evolution is a rigorous feedback loop. There is no inherent war inside the human organism between elemental impulse systems and higher-level cognition. They are part of the same internal ecosystem and it stands to reason they were all shaped through millennia of evolution together, rather than “newer” systems as addendums. The question is not whether those systems are “lower” or “older,” but how they all work together well for the organism’s wellbeing.

Our scientific categories are changing (and why I still use “systems”):

A lot of brain-language was built from what could be observed: behavior, injury patterns, coarse physiology, and cultural assumptions of the era. That encouraged categories that may blur structure, process, and function (“threat mechanism,” “executive function,”). As neuroscience and human biology develops, we increasingly model the brain as networks, timescales, and context-dependent coordination, not single-purpose modules with fixed jobs. I prefer the term “infrastructure” and use “system” as a temporary bridge: it respects earlier work without pretending our current labels are final. We are still building our understanding of the structures, their functions, best conditions, and most importantly, potential. We are well on our way to new categorization systems. In any case, if the study of our biology has taught us anything, it is humility.

17 · February · 2026
The Process & Purpose of Purpose
How the brain composes meaning and why you should participate in the process

Navigating Reality: The Illusion of Fixed Meaning

It may seem like some things just are, their meaning fixed and obvious. Likewise, we tend to believe that we choose our beliefs with deliberation and steer our decisions with clarity. But the brain does not operate like a compass that can point to truth when you have a clear head. The brain doesn’t chart meaning, it generates it in real time.
Each moment, our brains interpret vast input at incredible speed, long before conscious awareness catches up. We mistake this seamless interpretation for fact, for truth. But meaning is something we build, beginning deep within the nervous system that then works its way through our brain, being tagged and categorized along the way, filtered by as well as reaffirming our sense of self. This process is how we navigate the world, and it is always under way.

We think we are reading the world, when it’s more accurate to say that we are defining it as we go.

We are a ship always at sail.

The Hidden Process: Before You Know You’re Navigating

Long before you have a conscious thought about anything, your deep brain is hard at work processing your experience, looking for information that it finds relevant. Regions like the amygdala are scanning the raw data picked up by your senses for anything it may find relevant. Along with the insula and anterior cingulate, your deep brain flags what might matter: anything novel, threatening, familiar, or compelling as well as dismissing what is not. It is a fluid and rather complex categorization shaped by emotion, learning, and bodily state. The salience markers it develops are not objective data points. They are rankings, immediate, and embodied. They say, “this matters, this way,” and in doing so, impose meaning before you even have an opportunity to consciously question their valuation. This emotional tagging system is the first step in constructing relevance.

Then these cataloged signals travel swiftly into the prefrontal cortex, where you assemble them into enough of a story to act on. So, emotion isn’t irrational. It’s the very efficient product of a highly complicated neurocognitive process. In an instant, it condenses complexity into something you can act on. However, in feeding you coordinates, your deep brain has already imposed bias by choosing what to prioritize and why.

You’ve taken raw data and formed a detailed map and are moving through it before you’re even aware there’s a route on it to choose.

The tools of our navigation system are extraordinary, a nervous system that spans the body, limbic systems that assign relevance, an amygdala that flags what matters, and a prefrontal cortex that assembles meaning into action. These tools are always in use. The question is how these instruments have been calibrated.

Drawing the Map: Constructing Reality’s Terrain

What the deep brain flags as meaningful becomes the material of your internal cartography, a map of what matters, what doesn’t, what threatens, what inspires. You’re not just mapping mountains and rivers, you’re deciding what counts as mountains or rivers. What populates your map does so because you decided it was worth putting on the map in the first place through your own process of cartography.

The fixed points you’re navigating between, were fixed by you, or more specifically your deep brain. The meaning of reality you think is so factual and obvious, doesn’t just appear, it is constructed by your brain. While it seems universal, this terrain is personal. What one person avoids, another seeks out. A winding trail for one may be a well-lit boulevard for another. These differences aren’t moral or logical; they are interpretations. What feels real is actually just what feels familiar.

Moment by moment, the map of fixed reality you’re reading, you just created.

We are actively participating in the creation of the map we take as fixed right before we read it.

Creating the Compass: How We Decide What Matters

Old world maps were often decorated with mythical animals on them to mark the unfamiliar as dangerous. The Lenox Globe of 1510 actually has the words on it, “Here be Dragons” (Latin: hic sunt dracones). We’ve done the exact same to the maps we’ve drawn to navigate reality.

The complex emotional tagging system of your deep brain is not only telling you what makes up the map, it’s telling you how and where the meaningful directions are. What is passable or not was decided by you. Your map shows meaningful space that can be navigated, your compass tells you how and which direction to go. These signals that say “go this way” or “don’t go there” are the result of reinforcement, not revelation.

Your compass is built from repetition, social influence, and past outcomes. You learned what earned reward or sparked rejection. You absorbed values from those around you and internalized the directions they pointed toward.

You are not just holding the compass; you tuned its needle and then you follow it. At the same time, your brain is inventing the map and then deciding where true north lies.

We’ve constructed the landscape and the system to navigate it by.

Setting the Patterns: How Meaning Becomes Instinctual

Where did all this pre-meaning come from? Patterns begin forming as soon as your consciousness emerges. Repeated emotional experiences create highways in your neural circuitry, shortcuts that turn signals into instincts.

The people around you reinforce these shortcuts. They model, mirror, and respond, embedding cultural norms into your internal map. Over time, these grooves deepen. They feel natural, even inevitable.

But familiarity is not truth. The most traveled path isn’t necessarily the best one. It’s just the one you know.

This is how you created your instinct. And you need it. It’s a very useful tool that gets you through most of the day. You do not have the time or energy to engage with your complex navigational process at every moment. But instinct is not ancient wisdom, just memory with authority. It’s formed from what has been working until now. That becomes the path you walk by default. Instinct works until it doesn’t. That’s when someone has to take the helm.

What we take for truth and fact tends to be based on routine and familiarity rather than rigorous, mindful development.

The Journey: Meaning in Motion

Just as the fixed points on your personal map of reality are constructions, meaning that you made them fixed, so is the notion that it is all unmoving and immutable. Each moment we test, reinforce, and revise our internal systems by acting. Every step updates the map and compass we’ve constructed as no step is exactly like the one before. We are always on the move, evolving. The trail you take reshapes the terrain, which reshapes the trail, and so on.

Meaning is not static. It is generated in motion. Our beliefs are clarified, challenged, or calcified through what we do. Looked at together over a period of time, single steps form trails. In turn, and in collaboration with our society, we form tradition by grouping those trails together. But tradition soon recedes into legend because humans never stop moving. We stretch out this meaning to the horizons behind and in front of us. But that’s not how we live. We live in the step we’re taking right now, in the present. That step feels reasonable because it aligns with the meaning we just created and imposed. Overall, we tend to take steps, then assign meaning later.

We reinforce our interpretation of reality through living it. The maps we drew and the compasses we tuned aren’t just guides; they’re shaped by every step we take. This cycle is how instinct is reinforced but also shows us where conscious navigation becomes possible, if not necessary. We’re making it all up anyway.

Our maps of purpose and direction are created through an immediate and iterative process, being formed and reformed as we walk them, presenting themselves as terra firma.

Navigating with Intention: Acting Meaningfully

For most of life, autopilot works well enough. It’s instinct, built from patterns that have served you. But it’s not exact or fully present. When something truly matters, when the stakes are high, or the work unfamiliar, autopilot will drift if not fail. It cannot measure and account for complexity it has not learned yet. It can’t keep in mind new factors it has to consider and demands it has to meet. Letting old coordinates steer a new voyage is like setting sail without establishing where you are going, how long you’ll be gone, what provisions you’ll need, or how you can resupply.

Any meaningful project or relationship will demand that you take the helm, examine your goals, and chart your course deliberately. For meaningful work, you must pause. Ask: Where am I going? Why am I going there? And by what values am I navigating? While this work seems heavy and time consuming, it is not. You’re doing it anyway. Without this essential neurocognitive work, you will wander, waste time, effort, and resources.

Exploration is noble when discovery is the goal. The resources expended in the experiment are well spent, as they were intended for that. But if you need to get anywhere, you’ll need to chart a course.

When it matters take the helm of your life with intention.

Dead Reckoning: The Art of Purpose Making Without Absolutes

Dead reckoning was the process sailors used to calculate where they ought to be before the invention of celestial navigation, or when the stars were not visible. Celestial navigation provided fixed absolutes in the sky from which sailors could figure their position. While we feel we are navigating by absolutes, like the sailors with their sextants, we in fact are not. We’re dead reckoning, making it up as we go along, all of it, the sea, the boat, the rocks, the stars, and constellations we navigate by – we’re the makers of meaning.

Purpose isn’t an abstract concept. It is a process, a neurocognitive sequence of filtering, assigning relevance, encoding emotion, and taking action. It happens moment by moment, whether you recognize it or not.

You are always underway. But how are you steering?

When it matters, do you take responsibility for how you make meaning and consciously participate in structuring that process? When it matters, do you take the helm or let the currents decide?

You are never anchored. The strength of your purpose floats like the needle of a compass between unconscious autopilot and mindful intention.

Navigating with purpose is not a matter of control—that’s impossible. It is a practice of understanding and working with inner currents and external constellations, the way a sailor moves a ship with wind, sea, and stars.

01 · July · 2025
Rethinking Maslow
Breaking with a hierarchy of scarcity to cultivate neuroecological abundance.
In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed that human needs exist in a hierarchy, a model later famously codified into a pyramid. This visual suggested a rigid, stacked system: if basic needs for food and shelter were unmet, higher cognitive functions were not possible. He placed self-actualization at the peak, treating meaning and purpose as a kind of cognitive luxury only accessible once all lower tiers were fulfilled.

It’s a compelling framework, but its rigid, stacked architecture fundamentally misrepresents the interdependent, co-regulatory nature of the human brain. Modern neuroscience shows us that needs like meaning, connection, and flow aren’t indulgences; they are structural requirements for a well-functioning brain and nervous system, actively sought out even in the absence of safety.

A scarcity model of needs in a system that only grows when the lower sections are sufficiently strong is a narrative that can limit basic wellbeing. The brain’s actual processing is dynamic and co-regulatory.

The true problem with the pyramid is the subtle but devastating narrative it creates: if you’re struggling to meet basic physiological needs, higher functions—creativity, reflection, purpose—must be postponed or dismissed as luxuries. To internalize that view is to inhibit your own development.

A Note on Intent: This essay is not a critique of Maslow himself, who framed his model as an observation of typical motivational prepotency, not a fixed prescription. Rather, this is a critique of any framework that reductively interprets human existence through a capitalist lens of scarcity, which is precisely how the prescriptive pyramid has been used. Capitalism is a constructed economic framework with narrow aims, not a human or biological reality, and such frameworks can only manage the vastness of human experience by compressing it into abstractions that strip away its substance. It is the equivalent of expecting a rainforest to behave like a filing cabinet.

The Neuroecological Model: Tending the Systems for Sustainable Thriving

Rather than stacking needs by social convention or survival logic, a neurobiological model should reflect what the brain and nervous system require, daily or cyclically, to regulate, grow, and function. This shift treats the brain not as a machine with linear outputs, but as a dynamic ecosystem to be tended as we would a garden, coastal reef, or forest. This is the grounding for our new understanding.

This updated framework organizes our essential needs not by rigid hierarchy but by frequency of use, systemic impact, and cognitive cost. It identifies four neurological system groups that operate collaboratively in a dynamic, interdependent environment.
This reorganization liberates possibility by achieving a profound conceptual shift: it reframes the human experience from a deficit to be solved (drudgery) to an opportunity to be enjoyed (tending).

The core of my thesis is this: when we prioritize the brain’s essential systems, treating the brain as an ecosystem to be tended such as a tree, we don’t simply survive, we optimize. The work of integration—of tending your own “internal tree”—is not a hard-won, exhausting chore requiring radical sacrifice and intensive discipline. Built on dynamic systems theory, this work is meant to be as practical, natural, and obvious as knowing when to water a plant or seek the sun.

The neuroecology model replaces the pyramid with a living system: a tree of interwoven functions. Each domain supports the others in continuous, generative feedback—no one part is optional. Your PURPOSE, like the canopy, is not a reward at the top—it is the natural unfolding of a well-nourished system.

The Four Neuroecological Systems

Rhythmic Homeostasis System (Foundational Neuroregulation)
- Core Components: Sleep, Nutrition, Movement & Breath regulation, Light/Dark exposure (circadian entrainment).
- Impact: Without these, the brain’s capacity for all other functions collapses. These are hardwired biological cycles—non-negotiables.
Neurological Activation & Regulation System (Neurochemical Flexibility)
- Core Components: Sexual expression, Touch and safety (co-regulation), Novelty and stimulation, Emotional expression (limbic processing).
- Impact: These needs maintain neurochemical flexibility. Without them, chronic stress, anxiety, or hypoarousal can dominate.
Cognitive Patterning & Integration System (Meaning-Making)
- Core Components: Deep Focus & Flow, Meaning-making & narrative coherence (default mode network), Self-reflection and internal modeling.
- Impact: This is where purpose fits—not as an aspirational extra, but as a daily integrator of experience and action.
Neurological Synchrony & Expansion System (Social Intelligence)
- Core Components: Belonging & recognition, Creativity and symbolic abstraction, Altruism and transcendence.
- Impact: These support a brain’s need to extend, to relate beyond the self and to tap into emergent or collective intelligence.
Conclusion: Your Purpose & Individuality is Core to the System, Not a Final Reward

The prescriptive interpretation of the pyramid has an insidious corollary: Those who believe they’ve earned the luxury of self-actualization often pursue it without the systemic grounding necessary for true integration. Their efforts become hollow, performative, or even self-destructive.

Interestingly, Maslow’s model has been interpreted as both a critique and a byproduct of capitalism, where needs are commodified, and scarcity becomes its own form of reward. A dystopian, yet revealing frame.
Rather than being the final step, actualization, or purpose, can be redefined as an organizing mechanism: a way to align attention, effort, and emotional meaning. Purpose is not a final reward but a vital system, rising through every branch of life, essential to survival and quality of life.

Maslow’s pyramid inadvertently commodified wellbeing — turning our inherent capacities into milestones we must earn through compliance with economic structures. But true quality of life doesn’t follow a hierarchy. The brain does not wait for permission. It seeks meaning, love, and coherence even in the absence of safety, and sometimes because of it. Wellbeing isn’t something to climb toward — it’s something to root, reclaim, and grow.
16 · May · 2025