David speaks with Kyle Kowalski, a thoughtful entrepreneur, adult learner, and proponent of slow living. As an "independent, inquiring, interdisciplinary integrator," he shares insights on topics ranging from intentional living to mental mastery.
They talked about:
🌿 The philosophy of slow living
🧘♂️ The antidote to career burnout
🎨 The influence of creativity on career choices
🔍 The struggle to define who we are
🧠 The psychological roots of our desires
✝️ The stigma behind spirituality
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📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[02:41] The role of spirituality in slow living
[04:49] Kyle’s turning point to intentional and slow living
[08:06] The concept of ‘the lottery of birth’
[11:32] How early influences shape our professional lives
[13:37] How Kyle stumbled into marketing and what he learned
[15:59] The delicate balance between who we are and who we think we are
[19:22] Self-realisation starts with asking questions
[21:33] Why 'Who am I?' is the most important question you'll ever ask
[23:33] Why the stigma surrounding spirituality exists
[26:57] The true aim of spiritual and religious practices
[28:43] The evolution of repentance in a rational age
[31:36] Adult learning's role in self-realisation
[33:15] How our past shapes our search for purpose
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Sloww | https://www.sloww.co/
Marie Kondo | http://konmari.com/
The Road to Damascus | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_Paul_the_Apostle
Lottery of Birth | https://www.sloww.co/lottery-of-birth/
Paul Millerd | https://theknowledge.io/paulmillerd/
The Pathless Path | https://amzn.to/3Qn37kp
ADHD | https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/adhd.html
René Girard | https://iep.utm.edu/girard/
Ramana Maharshi | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi
MBTI | https://theknowledge.io/mbti-test/
Enneagram | https://www.truity.com/test/enneagram-personality-test
DISC assessment | https://www.discprofile.com/what-is-disc
CliftonStrengths | https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx
Jesuit High School | https://www.jesuithighschool.org/
Mortimer J. Adler | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_J._Adler
How to Read a Book | https://amzn.to/4fOvqEL
Daniel Schmachtenberger | https://civilizationemerging.com/
Generator Function | https://civilizationemerging.com/solving-generator-function/
Susanne Cook-Greuter | https://instituteofcoaching.org/author/cook-greuter-susanne
Intro to Ego Development Theory by Cook-Greuter | https://deep-psychology.com/cook-greuter/
Ken Wilber | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber
Abraham Maslow | https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Kegan's Theory of Adult Development | https://aliveandthriving.substack.com/p/kegans-theory-of-development-framework
Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey | https://www.jcf.org/learn/joseph-campbell-heros-journey
Creating Freedom by Raoul Martinez | https://amzn.to/3YNQXan
👤 Connect with Kyle:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KyKow
Website: Sloww.co | http://sloww.co/
eBook: Ikigai 2.0 | https://www.sloww.co/shop/ikigai-ebook/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
🌐 Website: https://www.davidelikwu.com
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🎙️ Podcast: http://plnk.to/theknowledge
📖 Free Book: https://pro.theknowledge.io/frames
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📜 Full transcript:
Kyle Kowalski: But in terms of slow living, one of the first things that I discovered in my crisis was the concept of slow living, simple living, it was really eye-opening for me, and I saw it initially as an escape. It was like, you know, at that point I was kind of trying to figure out purpose in my career and what purpose meant to me.
If I could embrace some of these concepts, then maybe this was a way that I could exit my career, maybe this was a way I could get out, maybe I could find something more purposeful.
David Elikwu: This week I'm speaking with Kyle Kowalski. Kyle is a thoughtful entrepreneur and adult learner and a proponent of slow living. Kyle describes himself as a synthesizer and solopreneur.
I first came across Kyle's work on Sloww.co maybe four or five years ago, and it was actually part of what inspired me to start writing my own newsletter.
You're gonna hear us in this very introspective episode talking about some of the lessons that Kyle learned from going through a personal crisis, as well as the idea, this philosophy that he's encountered and developed of slow living, what that means, how it can influence our choices and our ambitions.
Then we talked about the importance of finding your purpose and also the importance of cultivating a spirit of lifelong learning and some of the knock-on benefits that that can have.
Finally, we talked about this idea of challenging your life assumptions, challenging the creep of memetic desires, and being able to actively prioritise the things that you want versus the things that you need.
We talked about a lot of the hype that can come to surround ideas like slow living or minimalism, et cetera, and really what it means to be able to disentangle the things that are true to you from the things that are maybe part of a hype or part of a movement and what it means to really be able to disentangle some of the things that are true to you versus the things that might just be part of a hype or part of a movement.
So all in all, this was a really interesting conversation. I think if you are looking to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you, then this is gonna be the episode for you.
You can find the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at @theknowledge.io.
You can connect with Kyle on Twitter @kykow and read all of his work on Sloww.co, and you can also get his book Ikigai 2.0 there as well. I'll have all the links. If you're watching this on YouTube, the links will be in the description. If you're listening to this in your favorite podcast player, then the links will be in the description, but you can also go to the knowledge.io/kylekowalski and find everything there.
So if you love this episode, please do share it with a friend, and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts because it helps us tremendously to find other listeners just like you.
David Elikwu: A lot of the philosophy that you talk about is really interesting to me this idea of slow living, as a concept in general, and you've obviously written about it for a long time and there's a lot that you talk about, but I think there's a lot of different parts of it that would be really good to unpack, not just for the sake of being able to better understand it, but also as you've mentioned, the fact that it is slightly underrated by some people.
And I think one thing I've seen you talking about is this intersection between science and spirituality and the fact that some people often seem to disregard this spirituality aspect. You hear Tim Ferris, you hear a lot of people talking about, oh, you know, I don't wanna sound like woowoo or whatever. And I think that is a part of things that you seem to embrace.
So I'd love if you could maybe give us a framing of what you see as slow living being, and what you see as, I guess, this underlying philosophy.
Kyle Kowalski: I guess let's start at the beginning. So, slow living as a concept is something that I had no awareness of whatsoever until maybe late 2015 or sometime in 2016. And the reason for that timing was because in late 2015, I had a massive self-diagnosed existential crisis. So my background professionally is a decade in the marketing and advertising industry, primarily digital marketing. And for the first eight years of my 10 or 11 year career, I didn't question anything. I was just part of the system, my socialization and conditioning was just playing out and there were no questions whatsoever. It was just kind of going about life and everything was just happening as it did.
But in late 2015, that's when I had this existential crisis and I started asking myself all the deep questions. And the reason why I think this was prompted was because in my marketing and advertising career, I didn't feel like I had purpose. And that wasn't something that I, you know, went to, I wasn't thinking about purpose when I went to college or even when I started my career, I kind of stumbled into the marketing industry. I thought I was gonna go into graphic design, but sure enough ended up in the marketing industry, kind of stumbled my way into it. And then you wake up, you know, eight to 10 years later and you wonder how you ever got there in the first place.
But for me it was kind of this non questioning, just going down a certain path and direction. And then in 2015, the reason why that was different from the prior eight years in my career was, I was working 60 to 80 hour weeks, every single week for six months straight. And it's not uncommon to have these highs and lows and ebbs and flows of hours in the marketing industry, but it was a first for me to do it for six months straight, where you know, it finally broke me, I would say. Before that I would consider myself unbreakable and it was a, a source of pride and things like that, of course. But it finally broke me and that's when all the questions started. So, I started asking myself all those deep questions of who am I, what is my purpose, what is purpose? And that kind of set me down this path of the last really coming up on this year, eight years now since that crisis. And kind of just trying to figure out how and why to live? That's really been the essence of everything I've done with Sloww.
But in terms of slow living, one of the first things that I discovered in my crisis was the concept of slow living, simple living, a kind of umbrella all of this concepts under kind of a high level macro holistic umbrella of intentional living. Cause that's kind of the broadest term that I use to encapsulate everything. But under intentional living, I consider things like slow living, simple living, minimalism, decluttering, downshifting, voluntary simplicity, now, digital minimalism. All of these kinds of concepts are related and adjacent to each other and overlapping to a certain degree.
So, I had no idea that people were intentionally living like this. For me up to this point in 2015, it had always been the lifestyle inflation game or the hedonic adaptation or hedonic treadmill game of, you know, you get the job, you get the better job, you get the higher paying job, you get the car, you get the nicer car, you get the house, you get the bigger house like, that whole game of quote unquote the American Dream. From that perspective, that's just what I had been living and I hadn't questioned anything up until that point.
So when I discovered all these intentional living concepts, it was really eye-opening for me, and I saw it initially as an escape. It was like, you know, at that point I was kind of trying to figure out purpose in my career and what purpose meant to me. And I saw that, if I could embrace some of these concepts, then maybe this was a way that I could exit my career, maybe this was a way I could get out, maybe I could find something more purposeful. Whether that had to do with, you know, in my career at a different job or different job title or something completely different professionally trying to figure out what that looked like.
So the way that I describe slow living though, is in simplest terms, is what simple living is for your things. Slow living is for your time. That always kind of stuck with me because you kind of have your time and your space aspect. People are pretty familiar when you say simple living or minimalism or decluttering, you know, that has to do with your physical stuff or your, your environmental space that you live in. But slow living to me is more about if simple living is the space, then slow living is the pace. So you have those space and time aspects in terms of how you relate to your physical things. Of course, Marie Kondo and, that whole decluttering and, phase was big, but I don't feel like slow living, like you said, to start this out. Slow living seems to still be an underrated concept in terms of how people relate to their time.
So that's kind of how I got started and it just kind of blossomed from there. But everything started with intentional living.
David Elikwu: I'm really interested to dig into various parts of that story, but maybe let's start at the beginning because I think the way that you frame it, it very much reminds me of like, the Road to Damascus moment, where you have the pre-crisis life, you have the post-crisis life, you have the time where you were a Gentile, there was the way that you lived in the before times, and then you have this one pivotal moment and your mind is forever changed afterwards.
But I'd love to dig into maybe starting with that before time. You've mentioned in the past that I think your dad was an entrepreneur. I'd love to know maybe from both of your parents or from the people, the sphere of influence that you grew up in. How did that shape some of your initial ambitions and your initial view of life?
Kyle Kowalski: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question. Because a lot of people seem to skip over the childhood aspect of a person's story. But after you start reflecting on your own life and asking these deeper questions and get into the whole know thy self process and getting to know yourself psychologically and beyond psychology and all these different things. You start to realize how pivotal your childhood experience is.
And there's a concept that I've been digging to for the last year or so I called the Lottery of Birth, and we can maybe get into that later. But that has really just rocked my world in terms of opening my eyes and expanding my mind in terms of why I am the way I am. But like you said, there is a, it's funny you said this too, because I refer to periods in my life as pre-crisis and post-crisis because it was that pivotal, at least in terms of planting a seed and really kind of getting started in terms of setting a new course or planting a seed in terms of a new direction.
But in terms of childhood, I can't complain. I feel like I totally got lucky in the lottery of birth, I have amazing parents, had a great childhood. My mom has been a nurse her whole career. So she's definitely the loving caregiving, open type. And then my dad, my dad's the most creative person that I think I've ever met both just imagination wise as well as physically artistically gifted. So a lot of my childhood was raised in kind of that environment, and he's an industrial designer by trade or by profession, and has been doing that for decades, mostly in the robotics, like physical robotics space. But in terms of how that shaped me, the design side was something that was nurtured into me from a very young age. So my dad's mom, my grandma actually was a watercolor artist. Two of my dad's siblings are watercolor artists. So I would go over, get babysat by my grandma and she would teach me, you know, how to do watercolor paintings and things from a young age. So that was kind of, something that was really important to me growing up.
And that's why I thought I was gonna go into graphic design, right? Because I had done all of these artistic things, my whole life. But in high school I was up until two or 3:00 AM doing art projects and I realized, you know, this wasn't a sustainable thing in terms of moving forward. It was kind of one of those perfectionism problems where you just couldn't let the project be done or let it go. And so I was just up all night doing art projects and I was like, maybe I need to do something different in college and whatever.
But I think that eye for design has kind of stuck with me, whether it's a right hemisphere brain thing or whatever it may be. But that kind of aesthetic and eye for design is something that has stuck with me throughout even what I'm doing today in terms of, I describe it differently today. I'm not a graphic designer, but maybe you could call me like an information artist or a life artist or something like that in terms of you know, I do a lot of infographics of my content. Everything you see on Sloww is truly a solopreneur or endeavor. So, whatever you see is something that my only my hands touched, up to this point. So yeah, it's definitely been an important part of the journey.
David Elikwu: I love the watercolor aspect, but this is an interesting part. So, you know, you grew up with this kind of embedded in this milieu of intentionality in some respects, in terms of like design, in terms of painting, watercolor takes time, it takes some patience, it takes some artistry. And so I guess there was already some of those seeds there for you, but you still ended up in a marketing career for a decade or so, doing the 60 to 80 hour weeks. What drove that? Was that just something that you, obviously all of us, you're kind of, the analogy is almost like a conveyor belt where you have to go through school, you go through university, you are just thrown onto this path. Paul Millerd, who was a guest, actually I think he spoke with you also, he talks about the pathless path, right? There's this conveyor belt of the traditional path and the things that you were expected to do. Was that something that you found compelling at that time? Or did you also see some allure in what you saw, I guess, your aunts and uncles and your grandmother doing in terms of this slowness and intentionality that comes with making art and making design work?
Kyle Kowalski: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's funny you bring up Paul Millerd because, I actually just finished his book, The Pathless Path and I did a premium post on the Sloww website where I go through over a hundred different key points of how his story compares to my story. Obviously there are tons of similarities, but then there are obviously, you know, a handful of differences too in terms of how we ever got to this point, the realizations that we had along the way and, and even what we're kind of seeking now.
But yeah, in terms of intentionality along the way, you're right. I mean, in terms of all the design work, there is obviously a lot of intentionality and slowness and pacing and things there, patience, creating a space for yourself to be able to get in the right mindset or a flow state and things like that.
It does make me wonder though, it's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation of, you know, I have an introverted personality type. You know, I've done all, every type of self-assessment you can do and things like that. So it was it one of those things where the design work came before the personality type or the personality type is what embraced the design work. I'm not sure. Yeah, a lot of it has influenced me.
And then in terms of a Pathless Path perspective, so how I ever got into marketing in the first place. I don't actually have a conscious memory of how I ever picked marketing as a career or business administration or, you know, whatever, in college, I think it was probably a process of elimination thing. I actually picked the college that I went to because I got a partial scholarship to run cross-country and track in college, which only lasted a couple years. Because it was more like a job in college than the fun of high school. And I realized I didn't love it, which is actually a really important realization in terms of figuring out what you wanna do is equally as important as figuring out what you definitely don't want to do anymore.
I kind of call that good quitting in terms of okay, you've tried this, you've given it your all and you've done it for a long enough period of time where you've exhausted all options and you realize you don't love it anymore, and you want to move on to something you do love. I think that's a really important realization. Quitting has kind of turned into a dirty word but it's super important to figure out, these are the things I wanna quit so I can go try x, y, z, you know, new thing. So I call that good quitting, as oppose to just when in gets tough that would be bad quitting.
Kyle Kowalski: But yeah, so I kinda stumbled into marketing because I think it was a process of elimination thing. It was probably like, well, I know I don't wanna do that, I don't wanna do this, I don't wanna do that over there. And then it was kind of like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, well, I guess business administration and marketing is what it is. And maybe I'll figure it out along the way or something. But I don't have a conscious memory of intentionally choosing marketing. Which is why I think it probably, on the back end of my career is one of the reasons why I think it was easier for me to leave that career because, I don't really know how I got into it in the first place.
David Elikwu: Fair. There's a few things that you mentioned that just remind me of the gravity of this idea of self characterization and how we define ourselves and how we describe ourselves. And I guess this question will probably straddle, I guess the pre-crisis and the post-crisis in terms of, the question that I want to ask is, do you have a process for being able to accurately define yourself and figure out like, which parts of your belief system are true and honest and real?
Not long ago I had a conversation with my partner and she was saying something along the lines of, she basically said that I should get tested and see if I have adhd. And it's the first time it had come up in our conversations and my initial response was obviously one of shock and horror because it's something that I had always in the back of my mind, assumed that I probably do have, but just never actually, I can't be bothered to do any testing and I don't know somebody embrace it as part of my identity or anything like that. But I was looking at some questions and I was just did a little Google search, oh, you know, ADHD testing, and you see the kind of questions that people ask, and they all seem to be incredibly leading questions because as I was reading them, I was like, how could the answer not be yes, of course the answer, well, at least for me, it's gonna be absolutely yes to all of these questions. But what I also noticed was that it's strange how in some ways I might have answered no. So for example, one of the questions was, do you frequently forget meetings and appointments or things like that. And okay, on one hand, absolutely, yes. Like I'm never gonna remember anything. However, and this is where we get to the character decision, but part of my identity is that I feel like, oh, I'm good at developing systems for things and I feel like I'm good at organizing things in a sense, but what those questions made me consider is that actually a large part of the reasons I have needed to rely on systems. Like, making sure if someone wants to have a meeting, it has to be in my calendar. There's no way, cause I'm not gonna be there. Like it's not going to happen if this thing is not in my calendar. And I hadn't necessarily done some of the internal work to think about, okay, why have I developed these systems for things to be in this way? It's actually because if these things don't exist then my mind is gonna be completely cluttered and all of these negative externalities will come about. Like, you know, I'm gonna miss things, I'm not gonna see things. I check my calendar probably at least 20 times a day just to know when the next thing is coming. Cause if I'm just looking at the time, somehow, you know, you'll forget or time will fly.
And so it's this interesting thing going back to what you said about the chicken and the egg. Oh, do I embrace this personality because, oh, this is how I am. Or am I only this way because this is me compensating for this other side of me that potentially also could exist? So am I the messy one, or am I the organized one? Like I'm organized to compensate from the fact that I'm naturally quite messy. And René Girard talks about this idea of memetic ideals and mimetic desires, right? And so there were a lot of things, just like you talked about, you never had a conscious moment where you first thought, I want to become a marketer, but you definitely had a model for it. And in fact, that probably proves that you had some kind of model for it somewhere. Not necessarily in the form of a person, but at least the idea was modeled to you because it wasn't in your family, it wasn't in your natural environment. There's nothing you can remember seeing that modeled this idea for you and yet you found yourself going down that path.
And so really, yeah, my question is like, how do you disentangle your true self from the self that's reflected back to you through your actions or through the desires that you find yourself falling into?
Kyle Kowalski: Yeah, that's a, that's a big question and a super important one, and probably one that I'm gonna ramble off on and go on a million tangents. But let's, let's give it a shot. So,
I think the biggest thing is just, if you boil it all down, it starts with asking questions and your questions at the very beginning, at least my questions at the very beginning were driven by my crisis in terms of, I mean, I remember sitting in bed at 2 or 3:00 AM staring at the ceilings saying, am I really here on this planet for the short period of time to sell people more stuff they don't need?
And that was like my initial question, it was like I couldn't find purpose. At the time I was a senior brand manager at a global apparel company and doing brand marketing and things like that. And so that was my first question was, I was killing myself, I was literally killing myself with all these hours at work. And I think it was a combination of the high hours, which led to burnout plus, but it wasn't just the high hours alone. It was the high hours plus the lack of purpose. That was like a deadly combo and what finally broke me because, the high hours alone, like if anyone observed me now in my day-to-day life now they would say, wow, you still work a lot, you're still working those like 60 to 80 hour a weeks. And I'm like, well, I'm actually just playing for the vast majority of those hours. I'm actually just playing. It's not work to me at all. It might look like work to you, but it feels like play to me. So that's why I think in my career it was a combination of the high hours plus the lack of purpose which led to that initial question.
But the reason why I say, I think it all starts with questioning is because my questions back then, which is seven or eight years ago, and my questions five years ago, and my questions three years ago and one year ago, and my questions today have all evolved. And have gotten deeper and deeper and deeper. And this kind of circles back to what you brought up at the beginning in terms of the balance between science and spirituality and psychology and philosophy and all of these different things is you kind of see over time, if you start pulling on any of these threads or any of these subjects, you start to see how they are all interdisciplinary, they all interconnect. One leads to the other, it doesn't matter what your on-ramp for learning is. It all leads to this kind of lifelong learning, interdisciplinary study of all those deep questions. Ultimately getting to the deepest of the deep question, at least in spiritual terms, which is who am I?
However, when you first start that process, when I was asking who am I during my crisis, that was a question that led me to my psychology. It didn't lead to spirituality at the time because I just wasn't in that mindset. I hadn't psychologically developed to that point yet to even understand what that meant from like, if you reference someone like Ramana Maharshi or The direct path of self-inquiry or things like that, that wasn't even on my radar whatsoever when I first got started, the who am I question was the question that got me into my psychology and that's where you go through a phase of doing all those self-assessments in terms of MBTI, enneagram and Disc and Clifton strengths, I think it used to be called Strengths Finder, you name it. You start to get to know thyself on the level of your psychology, which I think is an important phase. I don't think it should necessarily be skipped, even though so many people talk about personality typing being equivalent to astrology and things like that. ~Because it's, it's, ~It suffers from self bias and narrative bias and how you want to be perceived versus how you honestly are. But I do think it's an important phase because you get to know yourself on the level of your psychology, and then that ultimately leads to deeper questions like you had mentioned, René Girard and the theory of mimetic desire.
So asking questions like, how did I get my desires? Why do I have this desire instead of that desire? How did I get all the ideas in my head? What are ideas? So you start asking all of those questions, which are at the level of your psychology, but start taking you to that edge of psychology and the edge of your mind, which naturally lead to the, the spiritual side and all those deeper questions. But all of those questions, especially around desire and things like that, I consider part of your socialization and your conditioning. And this gets back into the lottery birth concept in terms of why do you have the mind that you have in the first place? How are you programmed in a way? That all becomes a really fascinating phase once you go through that. And then I feel like that just naturally leads to all the, what I call quote unquote beyond mind stuff of what other people would call spirituality.
David Elikwu: I think we've mentioned a few times this idea that there is some level of stigma around this concept of spirituality. I wonder why you think it exists? And I think just to frame it, I think it's very much like a post-enlightenment thing, where now science is the ideal and rationality is the ideal, and the closer you can get to being able to prove concretely everything that you know and believe, the more you are seen to be seeking, I guess, like truth and that is what is right and that is what is honest and that those are the only things that exist. And in many ways, the things that are less tangible and are less easy to conceptualize or bring into hard science in some way are seen as, I guess like soft, we talk about hard sciences and soft sciences, right?
And I think in general is a really interesting idea and I'd love to know why you think we make such a strong distinction and what you think we might be missing by only favoring, I guess the things that seem really tangible in the form of science versus some of these spiritual and more existential things, which don't always seem to provide immediate answers because they require so much internal work.
Kyle Kowalski: Yeah, that's a great question and I guess I'll try to break it down into three different things. The first piece is just to offer some context and background is that I was raised Catholic, but I wasn't indoctrinated super deeply. And I think that's really important because I think there's a big difference in terms of adult life, and you can see it in a child's socialization in terms of conditioning whether or not someone was super indoctrinated or not. And actually even sometimes those who are super indoctrinated end up asking all the questions that lead them beyond how they were conditioned. I wish I knew what it was, you know, that flipped a switch for someone to be able to start asking those questions. But it's different for everybody right? There can like I said, there are a million different on-ramps to the highway of lifelong learning, I even went to a Jesuit high school. But for me, by the time I got to college, I was no longer actively involved in religion in any way, shape or form. So it wasn't something that was, I mean, in grade school we went to church every week, in some cases twice a week because I went once for school and then once with my parents on the weekend. But that was part of my childhood growing up and then through high school and then by college it kind of had just not even been a part of my life. So that's a little bit of background context in terms of spirituality being kind of like a Woo woo type word or, it definitely has a lot of baggage these days and I think a lot of that maybe comes from a lot of like, the new age spirituality stuff or even like the pseudoscience type stuff and things like that.
But you know, it's funny too, if you had asked me in 2014 or something or told me, you're gonna be involved in like, spirituality stuff and learning all about that and like, whatever, like, I have no idea what you're talking about that, I mean, that couldn't have been further from my life at the time.
But now that I'm kind of in this lifelong learning phase, like I said, everything interconnects. So for me it's less about adding new beliefs to my mind, and it's more about what I try to do is I try to butt everything up against my own lived experience. So the things that I'm learning, I try to say, does that jive with my lived experience? And if it does, maybe it does because it gives me new words to articulate something that I already had an intuitive felt sense or knowing of. And if it doesn't, that's equally important because it's like, why is that person describing something that's so different from my lived experience? And am I the anomaly or Are they the anomaly? Is this what most people think? So that kind of takes you down an equally interesting rabbit hole of trying to figure out are most people like this are not.
But in terms of spirituality versus religion, what I've boiled that down to is, there's a phrase called the finger pointing at the moon. And the idea is that religion is supposed to be the finger. It's supposed to be the guide. It's supposed to be what gets you to the moon or helps you see the moon is a better way of putting it. Because a lot of this is really about seeing in realizations, it's not about adding more content to your mind or labels to your mind, or puffing up your self-identity on a spiritual ego or anything like that. Like that's what they call spiritual materialism or spiritual narcissism. And then equally important, it's not about using spirituality as a way to get out of just living life that's called spiritual bypassing.
So it's one of those things where what I've tried to do is, if you read across a lot of different, even like religious or spiritual texts or even like indigenous culture texts and things like that, it's almost like the writers or authors are using different words to point to the same thing. And Mortimer Adler in his book How to Read a Book, talks about coming to terms with various authors. So if you're studying a subject, you're gonna read widely across it, you're gonna read a lot of different authors, they're gonna have different vocabularies. And at you as the reader, it's on you to figure out, are they actually saying the same thing in different terms? Are they using the same term in different ways? And so you have to synthesize everything as the reader to figure out, okay, here's how they agree, here's how they disagree. You kind of create your own vocabulary and keywords where you bring all of other authors to your terms.
And I think that's what a lot of religious and spiritual texts are. It's like, all these different fingers. There's like a infinite multitude of fingers all pointing at the moon. And so it's just most important to not get stuck on the finger and use the finger as the guide that it's intended to be to see the moon.
David Elikwu: That's a really interesting framing. I love what you were just saying about the religious aspect to it as well. And I was just thinking just before this actually, I was just listening to a podcast about the evolution of apologies. And again, this comes back to this grander idea of how frequently we've run into some of these issues that religion used to solve. There's a ton of things like in terms of how we socialize and the extent to which we act as individuals compared to the way we might act collectively and the way we might take care of each other collectively, the way we might support each other in communities, et cetera. And some of what we've lost by being so individualistic.
Similarly, apologies in so many different texts, obviously there's Christian texts, Hindu texts, lots of religious text from around the world, just like you say, fingers pointing to the moon, which used to talk about this idea so far before our current society of penance and repentance and you do something wrong and you have to repent and you are repenting for the higher power or for something else. And you are dealing with your immortal soul and that's what you're trying to save.
And it's so interesting how, I guess we've removed that layer and now we have this really weird thing in our current society where, people don't know what they're apologizing for. And we want people to apologize in very much the same way someone does something wrong. People talk about cancel culture. We want people to apologize. We want people to pay some penance, but we don't actually know what actions they should take. And these are the things that used to be written down. And it used to be that you know exactly what you're doing it for and who you're doing it to but now we're having to, I guess, figure out some new traditions and new ways of arriving at similar outcomes.
And I think, using apologies is just one analog, but there's loads of other examples of this where, there were framings for certain things that we used to have that now we no longer have. And I guess in this world of, you know, we talk about the rationality and the hard science. We have to figure out new ways from a societal and cultural framing to figure out what we're supposed to be doing and where we're supposed to be going.
Maybe part of this leads to the question of purpose, because I think this is the other thing, people talk a lot about this idea of schools, and I think you talked about your schooling experience, but people say, okay, back in the day, schools used to be to prepare people to work in factories, and now people don't have to work in factories anymore. So what is the purpose of schooling? What are we preparing kids for? It seems like people are coming out on the other side. They're very unprepared for the world of life. People come out of college, they just try and find a job. And then once you figure out what the job is, you go into a career, you're in that career for 10 plus years or for however long, obviously, you know, in total it's a grand amount of time, but there is very little intentional that there's no signposts at which you can intentionally step back and figure out, okay, what am I actually supposed to be doing? A lot of the deep questions that you suggest.
So I guess it's two part questions I want to ask. One is, what do you feel is the importance of purpose? And two, how do we go about actively finding it without having to go through an existential crisis or without having to have a big pivotal moment in our lives?
Kyle Kowalski: Yeah, that's a great question too. And I think your point about education and schooling is a big one. I've been going down a little bit of a rabbit hole over the last, well, actually since the beginning of the year. So the last three months or so on lifelong learning and adult learning and adult development and psychological development, and they kind of go hand in hand.
It just has been an amazing thing for me to realize, because I've been big into the psychological development space for a couple years now. But the adult learning space has been really interesting because it's like two people shaking hands. It just fits together perfectly in terms of the whole point of adult learning is to develop as an adult and lead to perspective transformation and deeper more holistic perspective taking and things like that.
So in terms of the school system, that is kind of a key piece in terms of, it still seems like it's a relic from the industrial revolution, like you mentioned. I think that one of the biggest things, there's a term called the meta crisis, which is a crisis of crises. Where you've got climate change and all this environmental stuff and exponential technology and AI now, and education. You've got all these different things converging at the same time in human history.
But to me it seems like the ultimate problem is, whether you wanna call it a problem or challenge or root cause. So if you do like the five why's question of just keep asking why and trying to answer the question, take any of those and try to get down to the root cause or what Daniel Schmachtenberger calls A Generator Function.
To me it all comes down to our relationship with our minds. And the solution seems to be further psychological development. But in terms of how that relates to purpose, let's just take one framework, like, Susanne Cook-Greuter has a framework called Ego Development Theory, and you can map her stages of ego development theory directly to, the reason why I go to that one as a default, just because I haven't come across, there are a hundred or more of these types of things. You know, you've got Ken Wilber, Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Robert Kegan's Theory of Adult Development, there are tons of them. And a lot of them or at least a handful or a dozen of which are pretty famous these days. But Susanne Cook-Greuter seems like an underrated one, but once I found that, I realized that everything she outlines maps almost directly to my experience over the last, definitely eight years, but even if you go further back to 10 years, 15 years ago and that kind of trajectory of what I've gone through so, it almost seems like getting all the way back to purpose now. It almost seems like this is a purpose becomes something at a certain stage of psychological development that people seem to be looking for. And yeah, it would definitely be great to, you know, not have to go through a dark night of the soul or existential crisis or identity crisis or quarter life crisis or any type of crisis.
There's another one called Spiritual Emergency. It'd be great to skip that, that whole phase. But I do wonder, you know, is it an important part of, whether it's Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey or there's a concept called Transformative Learning, and the first part of a like 10 step phase in transformative learning is a Disorienting dilemma. And it can be something like an existential crisis or it can just be a slow incremental compounding of something that happens over time.
So I think there are a ton of different ways to get to the point of figuring out purpose. It probably correlates to in Robert Kegan's theory, like a self authoring phase of life.
The interesting part, and this goes into a whole deeper tangent rabbit hole, is figuring out once you get to the point where you figure out that you aren't self-created and you know everything from your genes to your and your nurture, your parents, your environment, the education that you received, at least as a, as a young kid. All of these were decisions and choices that were made outside of your control, and those all shaped the brain and the mind that developed to get to the point of even asking the question of, what is my purpose, right?
So it's just like, it goes back to the chicken and egg kind of thing. There's a great book called, actually I've only read part one of the book it's called Creating Freedom by Raoul Martinez that gets into all the lottery of birth stuff and everything like that. But he talks about the paradox of you don't realize you have an identity until you already have an identity you don't realize your conditioning until you've already been conditioned.
And so it's kind of one of those things where it's like, you're created by all these factors outside of yourself, but then it gives you in some cases the ability to ask the questions of how did I ever become what I consider me in the first place.
That's a little bit of a tangent, but the whole part about purpose, is that, I think it's just a part of psychological development that I think more and more people are getting to that stage in modern times now. So I think, you know, obviously there are more humans than have ever been on the planet. Whether or not this is in higher prevalence percentage wise today than in the past, I'm not sure. But it seems like more and more people are starting to look for purpose. Obviously you see it in the corporate world where every company left and right is trying to bolt on purpose, whether it's natural to the company or not, or do some type of cost marketing or something.
But, it seems like it's become a hotter subject these days than it ever has been before.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
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