Analog Living: Creating a New Civil Society
The Key to Awakening Our Instinctive & Creative Consciousness
Welcome to part two of my previous post, “The Lost Art of Nuance: Reclaiming Our Civility, and Our Humanity“. It’s been about a couple of months since I last posted. After months on the road in Bali and Mexico I am just now finding myself back in a flow after being bogged down with the general busyness of re-acclimating into the “modern” “first world” West. It may be cliche to say, but even cliches can be truths, and often are. By being away in a different culture half way around the world I “see” more clearly and with greater potency what is at the source of the Western world’s current malaise than I did prior to leaving; and I can’t unsee it.
Let me begin by asking you a few questions to frame this post, and to ask you to bear with me as I set up the context for where we are heading with SourceCode. Take a moment and reflect on the state of your life. What’s going on in it? What’s working and not working? Think of your family, your friends. Now take a moment and expand your thinking out towards your community, your town or city. What is working, what’s not working? How about your country - where are there breakdowns, where are there things that you observe as just plain broken - things you may even find yourself complaining about? Now extend that further out to the wider world. What’s working and not working? What would you like to see changed, and why? Now let’s bring it back to you. What are YOU going to do about it; any of it, all of it… none of it? You’re a powerful creator. You have the power to evoke change, whether just in your own life, or for the lives of millions, if you choose to. Perhaps you have merely forgotten…
None of the things that you reflected on as “not working” just happen. Whether it’s a breakdown or a breakthrough, both are the result of human beings making choices, conscious or otherwise. You are one of those choice-makers, and so am I. As choice makers we must conclude that the problems we witness and experience in the world aren’t a world problem external to us, they’re a human being problem, or a lack of BEing human problem rooted in our disconnection from our essence as creators. When we are connected to and living from our essence as creators we don’t seek external sources of gratification to assuage our feelings of emptiness. We don’t seek to escape life, because as a creator even the mundane can be transformed into magic and mystery. Even the mundane can become something to lean into creatively and play with. We don’t commit violence on ourselves, others or the wider world. We don’t lash out at others. We don’t blame others, because our neighbors transform in our thinking from being “others” to “co-creators”, and suddenly civility is reborn. As creators we begin to collaborate and work together, rather than war against one another. In short, civility is born out of creativity, and together constitute a bridge from our petty finger-pointing complaints about our problems to proactive, actionable solutions that improve life for everyone. We will never change the world through political infighting and warring; we would have already accomplished it if it were possible. Only through creativity, and accessing our nature as creators will we create a future that matches the true nature and dignity of human BEingness.
We in the West are disconnected from our innate creative essence and our creative nature. Observing what is going on in the Western world after returning from my months long trip, it is more evident to me than ever that to live life creatively, instinctively and sensually, or what I refer to as “Analog Living”, is perhaps the truest act of rebellion against the clearly dysfunctional, inauthentic and unhealthy way of living and being we have sleep-walked into, and learned to tolerate over the past 100 years. Living Analog is an access point to reclaiming our authentic humanity, and by doing so, it is in the service of co-creating a new thriving human society where each of us are creatively alive and activated. Living Analog slows life down, allowing us to feel more deeply and to express ourselves without being at each others’ throats due to our egoic external attachments to commodified and consumed ideological or religious narratives that pit us against one another instead of going inward to transmute our fear and angst into something serene and sublime. For to Live Analog means to live from an immersive, aligned and integrated mental, emotional, sensual, and soulful place (this is distinct from the commercialized, used and abused mind, body and soul idiom / marketing meme). Difficult as it may be to transform and renew our mind, we can do it, and we must; and it begins with each of us. But we have to stop avoiding the effort and discomfort it’s going to take to transform things. Nothing worth doing is easy, and we don’t have to do it alone.
This is an invitation to those of you who want to join me on my quest to continue building our new Analog Living community and culture, both here on Substack, and beyond with our retreats, workshops and other programming at The Most Important Conversations. If this message speaks to you, let me know by joining the chat below, and if there are others that you believe this message will also resonate with, whether friends, family or acquaintances in your community, invite them along by sharing this post with them. Let’s dive in.
The Premise
I’ll begin by outlining the foundational premise: creativity is the highest expression of what it means to be human. While we often relate to creativity as being limited to the domain of artist, musician, or some other overt creative act, before creativity can be experienced in the form of “doing”, creativity is first a way of being. All humans are naturally creators. As Rick Ruben succinctly puts it, “Everyone is a creator”.
“Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us. Creativity doesn't exclusively relate to making art. We all engage in this act on a daily basis. To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before… To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes… You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.”
~ Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Following this line of thought, to live creatively is the most authentic form of being and living for us humans. When we are operating from a creative place we feel most alive, because as humans we create naturally, instinctively, intuitively - creators is who we are. Think about your own life. I have no doubt that the most alive you have felt in your life were in instances when you were creating, imagining, playing, or fantasizing something. Regardless of whether you are religious, spiritual or neither, it is insightful to note that the essential creator quality of being human has been acknowledged through our many philosophical and spiritual traditions. As merely one example, in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Old Testament book of Genesis it says “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness,… So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” What is this image of God we were made in? A creator, because in every religious and spiritual narrative God is the original creator. We were made as creators, and as creators we must instinctively create, for it is our nucleus, the purest expression of human being and living. To deny ourselves our creative nature is to deny ourselves the fullest experience and expression of being human - and such denial show up in a multitude of human dis-ease.
The Problem
From this perspective creativity isn’t simply something we do, as in music, painting or poetry, though all of these are expressions and acts of creation. But creativity is deeper than what creativity “does” or produces. To relate to creativity only by what it produces, is to relate to our very essence as creators through the same commodified lens we have been conditioned to relate to each other and the world through. Conditioned in a consumer based society, by default we have been taught to view everything through a commodified lens, including our fellow humans. Without the ability to see the creative potential that is each human being, our brothers and sisters become objectified “others” to be ignored, incarcerated, or eliminated, as opposed to being the mystical, magical, spiritual creators we were created to be. As objects, instead of playing and creating together, as we did when we were children, we view each other through a utilitarian frame. We are taught to produce and to perform, our very acceptance and respect depends on it, within the construct of our current society. All of this is a result of being detached from our creative essence. Others must fill the hole in our soul, because we have been trained to consume from outside ourselves. In our consumer-based society we have been relieved of our generative creative power, and been taught that everything outside of us is what matters. Consume this and that, ignore the screaming wound in our creative souls.
In 1928 Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund freud, and Father of Propaganda and Public Relations) published his seminal work, Propaganda, in which he stated:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ~Edward Bernays, Propaganda
Could there be a clearer statement of intent to transform the creator human BEing into the consumer human DOing as a policy of how our society is politically and economically organized and run? What’s more shocking is that Edward Bernays wasn’t outside of the mechanism of political and economic power. In addition to his impact on public relations and marketing for private companies, he was actively engaged in designing and implementing “communications” to persuade the masses to adopt various public policies. He consulted for and advised President’s Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, and during the Second World War he advised the Office of War Information (the Office of Propaganda), as well as the Army and Navy.
As a result of his work, and the work of the marketing / advertising industry following in his footsteps, the previous century set us up for the incivility that is now transpiring, which is only being exacerbated by social media and now AI. For a creator-human can only exist so long conditioned to consume life rather than to be a creator of life. In my workshops I always teach that we are either bending to the world or the world is bending to us. For most of us, as children we were conditioned to bend to Edward Bernays’ utilitarian world of the commodification of all life. Where clever narratives defined what was valuable as being that which is outside of ourselves, and value was determined by the utility of a thing once consumed/used - including people; where people’s value is not intrinsic, but defined by their usefulness.
In the 2019 award-winning film The Social Dilemma former Google and Facebook Engineer, Justin Rosenstein, lamented the outcome of this utilitarian commodification of life:
“We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive.” ~ Justin Rosenstein, The Social Dilemma
This wisdom is not new. The Cree Nation is credited with critiquing this same utilitarian commodified perspective:
“Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned will we realize we cannot eat money?” ~Cree Nation Proverb
These utilitarian systems and structures extricate the creative impulse from the human experience. Creativity poses a problem for the consumer-based economy’s objective of group think, which is clearly stated in Bernays’ thinking:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society… We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” ~Edward Bernays, Propaganda
For a consumer-centric society cannot survive if everyone lived as fully self-expressed creators, turned on and tuned into their nature as spiritual creator beings, following their imagination, their desires, and their intuition. For the past century, it was and still is a requirement that we all fall in line, turn off our imagination and in true utilitarian fashion, consume things, ideas, space, time and each other, losing our authentic self in the process. Choosing to become a proverbial “Brick in the Wall” we blur the lines and obfuscate our connectedness to ourselves, to each other and to nature. We disconnect ourselves from our spiritual essence, which is accessed by leaning into our creative instinct. When we are disconnected from ourselves and others, the disintegration and dissolution of civil society is what follows. For how can we have and maintain civility - the ability to honor, respect and be with each other - when we are living inauthentically and disconnected from our creative selves and from that of others?
Tragically, even many of the personal development, transformation, self-help, and spiritual workshops, courses and programs take a deep and profound concept and reduce it to a superficial marketing trope or meme that resonates with people at a conceptual level within the 8-second attention span we have been conditioned to accept. Such tropes not only lack depth, but entirely miss the mark of being-based embodiment, while re-enforcing the very conditions that leave us disassociated, exhausted, stressed, and in a state of dis-ease. Take the Body, Mind and Soul wellness industry we referred to earlier as an example. Rather than teaching people to embody their wellness through lifestyle practices and disciplines, which take time, creativity and effort, such ways of being are not needed to persuade someone to impulsively purchase the latest holiday release of bath salts, essential oils, candles, and facial masks; only the theoretical promise of embodied wellness is. Coming from a commodified mindset, the mere perception-altering suggestion that one is engaging in a body, mind and soul consumer wellness ritual is enough, even if the product they’re buying has little to do with their actual lived and experienced wellness. Time and effort are two things marketers seek to reduce, not increase. The path of the consumer has to be as effortless and as frictionless as possible. All resistance must be eliminated to the actual goal, which in this case is not ones embodied wellness, but rather ones’ point-of-sale transaction, followed by an upsell offer into the wellness club, where they will “receive points on all future purchases”. This is our conditioning, and is only one of a myriad of examples of the determinative impact our economic model has had on the form and substance (or lack thereof) of our society and culture, and ultimately its impact on us as citizens constituting this society and culture.
For despite our wishes and daydreams for a more fulfilling, meaningful and rich life, it isn’t going to happen without the necessary Analog Living tools and daily practices (we will get to this) to reconnect to our sensuality and essence as Creator. It is all too easy to fall into the grooves of our busy, attention seeking validation and looking good hustle culture. It is our commodified culture which leads us further into the pit of incivility, the result being poor health, poor relationships, a disconnectedness from our true aliveness and alacrity. Instead, we ride the adrenal waves in search of the next external dopamine hit and rush, only to collapse into burnout or lash out and react against commodified “others”, who are ostensibly responsible for why we feel so shitty, because they failed to be useful to us. It’s never us, it’s always someone else’s fault in the commodified construct we find ourselves in. The way we have structured our society (and we are complicit in this each time we go along with it) effects the way we individually structure and live our own lives, where we often find ourselves caught in the momentum of a way of being that is anything but authentically human, as we continue the drift downwards into deeper layers of inhuman superficiality. This cycle further devolves the quality and nature of our relationships - the relationship we have to ourselves, to each other, and of course, to nature, and ultimately results in societal breakdown.
While all of this may sound overly philosophical, it’s important to understand that the pejorative critique of labeling something “philosophical” and not “practical” (useful, utilitarian) is relative to the level of superficiality we mistake as “normal life”, and is in and of itself why we are collectively trapped. Philosophy, spirituality, art, and high culture used to practically and usefully inform what was possible for each of us by establishing aspirational standards of depth, mastery, beauty, sensuality, meaning and magic. Today, steeped in our utilitarian group think, philosophy, spirituality, art, and high culture are deemed impractical, not useful, “elite”, and anything elitist is now marketed to us being a waste of time and of no use. “It’s too much effort”, “it takes too long”, “no one will buy it”. These are just a few common capitulations rehashed and regurgitated as talking points, reinforced by “men we have never heard of”; the marketers who Bernays transparently acknowledged mold our minds and form our tastes. We have been taught to discard and disregard things of depth because of the so-called impractical nature. “Just consume people, places and things, and pay no attention to that highbrow stuff.” But consider the alternative. In a world without depth, we have superficiality; in a world without beauty, we have ugliness; in a world without sensuality we have numbness; in a world without meaning we have shallow emptiness; and in a world without magic, we have the mundane. You must choose. We all must. Will you continue to tolerate a superficial world of shallow ugliness, where our senses are numbed out by the mundane, or would you like to co-create and live in a world of depth, beauty, sensuality and magic? A world that activates your deepest essence as a creator?
The Solution: Analog Living
Let this moment be a line in the sand for you and your life. All of us are individually responsible for the level of civility in our life and the wider society, or lack thereof. When we deny, suppress, and repress our instinct to create, to express ourselves authentically, to see others and be seen, to hear and be heard, when we fail to create a sacred space where we can connect and share in the beauty of each life experience, unconcerned with ideology, philosophy or religion, we continue to devolve into something less than human, which further destroys the human spirit. The current lack of civility bubbling up around the world in modern societies is nothing more than human beings crying out for something deeper, something real, something organic, something natural. Despite all of the conveniences of modern life that were supposed to assuage our inner creative angst, when we feel unseen and unheard, people begin to rebel against the machine that we have allowed to lull our creative spirits to sleep for far too long. Creativity bottled up sometimes metastasizes into violence and destruction. When not allowed to express itself creatively, our creative instinct and desire can turn on its head, where destruction is simply the opposite side of the creative “coin”. The proverbial forest fire leading to the growth of new forest. This is what we are starting to see in the populist rebellions and riots taking place across the globe. Most of these people aren’t bad people. They’re people! Creative people who have been denied their “creative birthright”, relegated to being mindless consumers for generations. They’re waking up. Yet, because they have had their creativity conditioned out of them, they resort to the path of least resistance…violence. It’s always easier to destroy than it is to create, but there is another way.
Creativity is first a way of being. In all the big AND the little moments of life, creativity is the essence of being human - it is our essential nature, and our true north. Choosing to live an Analog Life is an access point to re-enter the magic and mystery of ourselves, of each other, and of nature. Our creative potential to realize a new world must be based on a new value system steeped in creating and not merely consuming life. Once we access our creator essence, all of life suddenly blossoms as living art. You simply “see” differently, but you first have to believe it in order to see it. Creativity is a way of being that we were born with. As young children, we create, we play, we pretend, we imagine, we dream, and we fantasize. Prior to our conditioning, prior to when we were told we were too much, or not enough; prior to when we were told who we were to be, and how we were to be; prior to when we fell into the trap of being validation seekers who needed to be useful, as defined by our commodified culture and at the cost of our authentic self expression and living life according to our true desires; prior to all of this we were natural creators. We were instinctual. We were intuitive. We were led by our imagination, and through play (creativity in motion) we explored the world of the possible.
Analog Living is a way of reclaiming our true creative power as humans, even in the midst of the fall we are currently experiencing. Analog living is closely associated with the Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi. It’s about slowing down, reactivating our senses, going deep instead of wide, reconnecting to the magic of life, activating and embracing ecstatic states through art, music, sensuality, philosophy, travel, and real world connection with others and nature. Through Analog Living we can believe again, we can dream again, we can lean into being aspirational, accessing a new possibility for practical action. When we don’t resist the effort or the discomfort it takes to create our life, and we begin creating for no other purpose than the process of creating is when we relate to even the most mundane of tasks in our day as being magical.
I’ll conclude this post with a personal anecdote as an example of the power of Analog Living as a path to creativity. I enjoy a cup or two of coffee in the morning. Now, I could simply pop a coffee pod into a machine and have coffee in under a minute, or program a drip machine the night before to have it ready for when I wake up. Instead, each morning I get up and turn the mundane into the magical: I create “coffee time”. I light incense, sometimes I burn a candle. I select choice music for the mood I seek to set. If it’s winter I’ll have a fire in the fire place burning. I buy whole organic espresso beans, and each morning I boil water, and grind my own beans and make my coffee in a French press. This takes time and effort, about twenty minutes in fact, before I can take my first sip; but it is a richer experience because of it.
Whether you are making coffee, dinner, lounging in the yard on a summer afternoon, organizing a getaway with the family, at work, or simply selecting what to wear before meeting a friend for lunch - everything can be art when you slow down, become intentional, activate the senses and practice making the shift from conditioned consumer to the natural creator of your life. Living creatively gives us access to a richness and depth that isn’t there when we are mindlessly going through the motions, just to get to the next thing, to be productive, to be useful in someone else’s eyes.
To live analog is to be in the world but not of it. Because of this, Analog Living is the ultimate rebellion, and is the heart and soul focus of accessing our true self, our Source Code.
Join me for future posts on ways to connect deeply to your creative self, to live sensually, to Live Analog, and to access the Source Code of your operating system.