My Life's Purpose
Thankfully I made it through the night, so I can share this amazing understanding with you.
The understanding I’m about to share with you is so valuable that I’ve dedicated my life to it, and I’ve come to think about it as my life purpose. It felt like I’d searched for it my entire life.
This summer, I started a long series about simplicity and complexity that now has over 20 videos and essays.
Today, we’re finally getting to the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity. You’re going to discover a simple, transformational way of understanding what’s going on with the world. It changed my life.
There was a moment where I thought, “Whoa, if I figured out my life purpose already, what if I’ve gotten to the end?” I made sure to write it down before going to sleep because I was afraid I wouldn’t make it through the night. Maybe I’d be struck by lightning or just wouldn’t wake up.
But I made it through the night, and I’ve had ten years to practice this, consider it, and refine it. I’m really excited to share this with you. This is the first time I’ve really put this together, so you’re in for a treat.
Yin-yang
Let’s look at the yin-yang, which comes from Daoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy. While it seems simple, it’s a little more detailed than you might imagine. Yin-yang is a system generated by the duality between what the Chinese call yin and yang.
There are different ways of thinking about duality, but you may think of:
Order and chaos
Known and unknown
Hot and cold
Day and night
Light and dark
Masculine and feminine
Today’s focus is the dual tension between self and other. The idea of this tension is that, on the one hand, each of us is free, and we can do whatever we want. On the other hand, we need to be in relationship with each other and the world, and that comes with all sorts of constraints. We can think about this as freedom and limits.
One of the great ways of explaining this tension comes from a guy named Paul Tillich, a German-American theologian. He called this tension power and love.
Tillich defined power as the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity and extensity, and he defines love as the drive towards the unity of the separated.
That brings us to the idea that it’s really not about power or love; it’s actually about power and love, us and them. There’s this ongoing tension between self and other: Between freedom and independence on the one hand, and interdependence and connectivity on the other.
If we’re in conflict, it means we’re in relationship. When we’re polarized, we’re part of a larger whole. Our system looks like it has two sides, but that’s an illusion. Whether we’re looking at Democrats or Republicans and left or right, they’re actually one interdependent system.
The importance of polarities
This leads us to Barry Johnson’s polarity thinking. I’ve written about interdependent polarities before, but let’s quickly explore what they are.
Two sides may seem like opposites, but they give each other meaning. You can’t have one without the other. They’re a single system, so we can’t have a sense of self without having a sense of other, and vice versa. We can’t define who the other is without knowing who we are.
The wicked problems we’re facing generate these systems. There’s a unifying question bringing any interdependent polarity into tension. We can think about this as the center of gravity or a strange attractor. Wherever we find a polarity, it’s revolving around something else. This is one of the simplicities on the other side of complexity.
Whatever we’re all fighting about is something that connects us. We can also think about these questions as this vanishing point on the horizon. We can get closer and closer to it, but we’re not actually going to get there.
Here’s a fascinating insight: When we’re managing a polarity, one of the first things we need to do is identify, understand, and agree on the question we’re trying to answer. We have to figure out what we’re even talking about. That’s the foundation for attempting any conflict transformation process.
Instead of asking, “Do you believe in this, or do you not believe in it? Do you join this side or not?”, we need open questions like, “How can we deal with gun violence? What do we do about climate change? How can we manage inflation?” For any wicked problem or complex system, any great open-ended questions will lead to infinite answers.
Carving our paths
That brings us to the next feature of the yin-yang that is worth pointing out: The curved line, which is the dao, or the way. In Daoism, it’s important to stay on this path to gain as much clarity as possible. If you’re not on the dao, life won’t go too well, but life will be great if you follow it.
But how does that affect us? We can look at the dao as how we live our lives. Yin and yang are the various ideas that inspire us, and when we incorporate those into our lives, they’re added to our life path, defining that curved dao line. It’s a reminder that life and our beliefs don’t form a straight path.
The symbol has circles of black and white on the opposite sides. This demonstrates interdependence and the fact that we can’t just choose one side. Life is much more nuanced than right or wrong and this or that, and the yin-yang reminds us of that.
We can view life and our decisions as better or worse, allowing for change and nuance. Every action we take moves us closer to one of those. We’re never going to be able to agree on “right” or “wrong,” but we can definitely come up with shared criteria on what’s better or worse. Does that seem impossible? Here are some examples:
Is it sustainable?
Does this way lead to chaos, or does it work with the system?
Is this inclusive and respectful? Does it take everyone into account?
Are we navigating this issue smoothly, or is it painful?
Why balance matters
Polarity thinking teaches us that we need to ensure a balance. If we choose one polarity at the exclusion of the other, it’s almost always destructive. If we try to make sure that one side wins or the other loses, it won’t work out.
But if we can figure out how to spread our attention between whatever’s polarizing us, it can become a generative system. This is because the positive qualities of one side will balance out the negative attributes of the other side and vice versa.
Let’s consider this in the context of power and love, self and other. If you only do what’s good for yourself, your group, your political party, or your country at the expense of everyone else, that becomes destructive. Martin Luther King, a student of this power and love dynamic, called this reckless and abusive.
On the other hand, if we only care about the needs of others and we do this at our expense, that will drain the energy out of the system. It takes away people’s initiative to try and make things happen. King called this sentimental and anemic.
We need to find a balance between individual freedom and collective unity. If we can do that, it’ll make us stronger.
We’re answering questions and bringing polarities into reality with every choice we make and every interaction we have with other people. This is true at all scales, from the individual, interpersonal level to groups, national, and international levels. The whole system is being impacted, which brings us to infinite complexity.
That means the elegant simplicity that the yin-yang offers doesn’t quite do justice to the system. It’s a little too easy to look at this symbol and imagine that we’re battling as good and evil, right and wrong. That misses the nuance.
The Mandelbrot set
Instead, I think the tension we’re trying to navigate looks a little bit more like this:
This is called the Mandelbrot set, created by Benoit Mandelbrot. It’s a fractal, which is something that is self-similar at all scales, created by the repetition of a recursive problem-solving process or a recursive algorithm. It leads to infinite complexity because it’ll keep on growing.
This leads me to the fractal yin-yang. That’s what I believe is so important that I’ve dedicated my life to it. To give it the justice it deserves, I’ll talk about this in the next essay and show you the beautiful visual model that puts all of this into perspective.
Thank you so much for wanting to co-create a future together. It means a lot.
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What a fabulous article!