The Only Thing to Do

go all in

Exhaustion is the most important part of human development, and almost every discussion leaves it out.

Any example will do — let’s take Robert Kegan’s developmental psychology. Here’s a diagram that gets at how people tend to think of it:

Each stage builds on the one before it, becoming something greater that transcends and includes the stage before it. Each stage comes with a new benefit, a transformed way of perceiving and acting in the world. You develop further, and you get more of these benefits, you add them to the pile. You unlock the next level.

But here’s the thing: those understandings and benefits listed at each stage — reaching the point where you have those doesn’t mean that you’ve completed the stage. It means you’ve started it.

A lot of discussions mistake this, saying something like “yeah, I’ve researched stage 4, and that seems about where I’m at. Time to start working on stage 5!”

Which is very precisely wrong. Wherever you are, right now is the time to start working harder and harder on exactly where you are. If you think you’re stage 4 (or whatever other stage in whatever other proliferation of developmental models you subscribe to), the only thing to do is to go all in on exactly where you are.

I’m going to repeat that, it’s a good reminder to have burned into one’s head:

THE ONLY THING TO DO IS TO GO ALL IN ON EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW.

Cut a chrysalis open and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly… No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

— Pat Barker

I’ve heard it said that “no one changes unless they want to.” That’s maybe true, but nowhere near sufficient.

No one changes unless they have to.

See: in order to move into the next phase of your development, you have to exhaust the possibilities of the previous phase. What you’re doing — what you’re capable of doing — has to be demonstrably not good enough. If it was good enough, you could just keep at it, it would still work. If that’s the case, there’d be no reason to change. Especially, there’d be no reason to undergo the ego-shredding life-collapsing change of dissolving your old mind and growing a new one.

“Exhaust the possibilities of the previous stage” sounds so clinical. Here’s what it really means:

You have to try, really try — and face the fact that you have failed. You have to try again and again, in every way you know. You have to see clearly that this failure is fundamentally a part of who you are.

You can’t blame the world, or your parents, or your competitors, or the distractions of modernity — you have to be dragged shrieking into the total stone certainty that this failure is built in to the type of existence that you are.

At the same time, you have to see that precisely this existence that you are is what has gotten you this far. You have to see all of its gifts and pleasures and advantages — and you have to see that its limitations are inescapable.

You have to cry and scream and plead and make every effort to hack the system, to somehow get the things you want without becoming a new type of person. Without undergoing a process of transformation that consists almost entirely of decay.

And then — not because you want to or because you choose to, but simply from the matter-of-fact reality of how far a mammal psyche can stretch — you must collapse.

That collapse is where it begins — the desert between phases. You’ve depleted the soil and used up all the aquifers; the standing reserves of your old way of being are spent.

So now, after exhaustion and collapse, it comes down to it: can you make the desert bloom? Because the desert is where you are right now, and

THE ONLY THING TO DO IS TO GO ALL IN ON EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW.

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