In modelled competitions between organisms tuned to perceive the truth of the world and organisms tuned to see only to what directly helps them survive, the truth-trackers consistently lose.1

Ouch.

It hurts to read that.

Seeking the deeper truth has always felt immensely important. How could it not be important?

That was my first reaction. But notice that’s not the claim.

Pause here.

What this is saying is that perceiving reality for what it objectively is, is not a survival advantage. At least not when we are competing with one another for a clearly defined goal. And that’s the caveat.

Subscribe now

First the research

The claim comes from evolutionary game theory — specifically the work of Donald Hoffman, Manish Singh, and Chetan Prakash.2

Game theory is the mathematical study of strategies in competition. A programmer builds a world with fixed rules. Resources are limited. Each organism has a strategy locked-in. Organisms that get to reproduce pass on their strategy — and that’s the win (the strategy spreads and becomes dominant).

“Perception” names all of what we register about our world.
In this context, perception is said to be “true” if it preserves the structure of the world.
When it erases some of the structural features — like how things relate to one another — it cannot be said “true”, even if it’s not false.

In these competitions, some organisms have a truthful map of reality, others only have a map of relative payoffs.

As an example, say a resource comes in three actual amounts: low, medium, high. Both strategies require exactly three signals. A truth-tracking organism will map signals in a way that preserves the order (i.e.: weak signal for low amount, strong signal for high amount). While a payoff-tracking organism won’t necessarily do that. If the medium amount is the most reliable payoff, this organism will assign the strongest signal to the medium amount. Notice both strategies require the same perceptual capacity (i.e.: 3 signals).

Hoffman et al. showed that, across an enormous range of worlds and rules, if you let these two strategies compete, truthful perception disappears from the population.
And that’s not all.
As world complexity increases, the outcome gets more decisive — truthful perception disappears more surely, more completely.

In his 2019 book The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, Hoffman argues that perception did not evolve to show us reality.

But wait a second…

There is reason to ponder on the applicability of these findings. After all, the results are entirely computational.
A computer program isn’t the real world. It’s a model that operates from a set of rules — which stay fixed for the entire run.
Also notice: each organism has one strategy only — and that strategy doesn’t budge.

The simulations run to a fixed endpoint in a static world. But evolution is an ongoing process — rich in feedback loops.

Some biologists have pointed out specific examples in which accuracy and evolutionary fitness are inseparable.3 For example, bees and bats do build demonstrably accurate 3D spatial maps. They need accuracy to navigate, to forage, to find their way home.

The broader take-away

It’s probably unfair to claim that truthful perception has no adaptive value at all.

However, it is also undeniable that payoff mapping is a logic we know well.
Look at how far it reaches.
We’re tracking performance metrics and ROIs, not only in corporate boardrooms, but in the most intimate spheres of our lives — measuring our value as people.

Most of us are well tuned to what pays off — what earns approval and proves we belong. And there’s something fundamental here: we turn to what’s most likely to keep us safe.

Where it falls apart

Having a map — a model of how things work, of what deserves attention — is what allows us to orient action and move toward the bigger goal of life.
In Hoffman’s simulations, that bigger goal is clear. Reproduction. That’s it. No ambiguity about what “winning” means.

Maybe we once had something resembling that — a coherent story about what a good life is, what success means, what you’re supposed to be reaching for.
Many of us were brought up to think winning is climbing the socioeconomic hierarchy. A house with a spouse and kids. A valuable role that earns recognition.
We’ve been made to believe that would be it — success.
And then what happened?

Global household debt has reached a record $65 trillion.4 One in six people worldwide report chronic loneliness — and among young people, it’s closer to one in five.5 Depression remains, by WHO’s own count, the single largest contributor to disability worldwide.6 Antidepressant use continues to climb alongside all of it.7

We don’t have a clear understanding of the bigger goal of life. We just have the momentum of chasing a goal that stopped making sense.

Share

Much of our sociocultural ways were built on the myth of meritocracy — that hard work earns a fair share.
But look closer.
Resources are hoarded at the top of a pyramid.

We were made to believe that competing with one another is the only way to secure our livelihood. That’s our nature, right?
But if competing means endless exploitation — treating living beings as expendable — is that our nature?

More and more of us are spotting missing threads.
The map is fraying.

Reorienting

Our collective map of “how things work” has allowed us to get here — to this point.
But a map only works as long as the world holds still long enough to match it. Ours doesn’t hold still.

Some of the rules we drafted our map around no longer apply.

Moving beyond this point, toward something actually meaningful, demands we step outside the map — into the unknown. And that is precisely why truth-seeking, as an orientation, is absolutely aligned with evolutionary fitness. Not because we need the objective truth of reality, but because having seekers within the collective — exploring beyond the map — is what lets all of us adapt when the ground shifts beneath us.

Perhaps truth itself is something we never get to. But that’s not the point.
The seeking is the point.

Leave a comment

Too many subscriptions already?
Here’s another way to show support:

Buy me a cofee

The agreements we inherited about how to belong, and what to live for — they’ve revealed themselves hollow.

Grief is an apt response.

But don’t mistake it for a closed ending.
The paradigm is not a fixed reality.
It’s a shape that perpetually renews itself.

Subscribe now

Steered by meaning

Survival requires we make assertions — what means what.

A paradigm is the result of our need to model how things work. And orient toward what is most likely to sustain our livelihood.
We associate certain actions, behaviours, and attitudes with certain outcomes.

A sociocultural paradigm is a shared orientation system.

We want there to be a consensus on how things work. Because we need predictive reliability. We need to make decisions and choose attitudes and behaviours that sustain us.

But reliability doesn’t mean truth. In fact, reliability here relies on abstractions.

Provisional arrangements

Abstractions are useful so long as they allow for a coherent story.

Astronomy once placed the earth at the centre of the cosmos.
It worked for hundreds of years — it predicted the movement of planets well enough to steer by.
When small errors started surfacing — with measurements getting finer — astronomers didn’t abandon the earth-centred model. They patched it. A circle inside a circle. Then another. The model grew more intricate — but the errors kept coming back. The equinox was drifting off its date. The calendar itself was sliding.
Something was undeniably not working, and yet astronomers held on to that paradigm because there was no coherent alternative.

We do this with the “how it works” paradigm.
We protect its validity, we exile what threatens its coherence — because we need a framework to rely on.

Systemic entrainment

At the sociocultural scale the paradigm says: Merit is earned.
The underlying assumption is that individuals must compete for resources.

The same message is internalized: some human traits — parts of you — earn rewards. Other parts threaten your access to what sustains livelihood.

Steadiness, composure, self-reliance — rewarded.
Sensitivity, interdependence — liabilities.
These are collective agreements inherited, about what to feed — and what to exile.

When you comply — hustle, mask your inferred inadequacies — you participate.
The fear of falling behind perpetuates the collective orientation. The shape of the paradigm. The hierarchy of control and exploitation.

Narrative fence

Believing that we will get what we deserve — if we work hard enough — is a compelling story. It offers reassurance that the world is just, and that we have some control over our fate.

We protect that story.
In the face of failure — mine or yours — we place reasons.
Bad choices.
Personal defects.
The system is never on trial. We are.
Turned inward, the verdict becomes shame: I didn’t measure up.
Turned outward, it’s separation: I’m not like them — that could never happen to me.

These are paradigm-reinforcing storylines.

Deep down you know. In this paradigm, your dignity and belonging are conditional.
The moment you stop measuring up, you lose.
That’s why the most marginalized groups of society make us so uncomfortable.
They’re the proof that — in this model of reality — we can’t all make it.
That’s why we’d rather look away. Preserve the illusion that we’re safe — inside the model of “how things work”.

Participatory switch

Shifting how we orient, moment-to-moment, demands more than mental deconstruction.
The grooves that direct the flow of our attention and intentions were carved through generations. And amplified with repetition on multiple scales.

You may recognize the patterns playing out, understand how they’re incongruent with deeper values, but still perpetuate them.

Like the astronomers, we need to build a new model before we can collectively rupture from this one. A more coherent model — that doesn’t demand we exile parts of our humanity.

This model will not take shape in the mind unless it’s shaped through direct experience first.

We need the lived experience of a different collective arrangement. One where we are tending to each other.

The work is reconciling with all the parts. The ones inside. And the ones we’ve cast out. Marginalized. Excluded.

Share

If the fear of falling behind is what fuels the old paradigm, loving what is already here is the switch. It’s how we fuel the quieter currents that will not be entrained by the old shape.

These quieter currents are made of love — and enacted as care.

This redirection of our attention and intentions will not be initiated from a source above.
It will emerge from the ground up — on multiple scales at once — as a reconfiguration of meaning-making itself.

The paradigm is a living system we continually feed — through what we pay attention to, and what we enact.
The invitation is to widen your lens — beyond the habitual flow of your attention.

What needs tending to, in this moment?

Leave a comment

Buy me a coffee

Lately I have been leaking out of the ordinary realm. Into mysterious depths. And I like it there.
I want to stay. To finish shaping that viewpoint into consciousness.
But in these depths, every piece of understanding invites a new — more profound question.
And it’s been weeks now.
Too many dangling threads tickle my attention.
I’m moving along my exploration.

I want to write — share. But words cannot translate a direct experience without compromising meaning.

Read more

We romanticize the stoic figure — unmoved, composed, undisturbed by what they “cannot control”. But like with any other appropriation, we are only ever handed part of the story. Stoicism developed under conditions where people had little power to shape the systems governing their lives.

Who decides what is or is not within your power?
And when do you get to break the fence?

The world we live in now does not need us stoic.
It needs us bothered.
It needs us loud.
It needs us expressed.

Yet we continue to pathologize state variability — we devalue people that exhibit noticeable fluctuations in their emotional states and behaviours.

This is one of those agreements that serves the existing system. That which needs us functional, productive, and consistent — and fuelling the capitalist machine.

Read more

Finding the root of what tugs

Somatic therapy is based on the idea that your body holds on to activated states (like bracing or tension patterns) until the natural physiological response can be completed.

Subscribe now

Right now, as you read this, there’s a quality to how you’re holding yourself. Notice your shoulders, your face, your pelvic bowl, your toes…

Now what happens if you imagine something disturbing?

Experiencing the world isn’t only cerebral.
Before cognitive interpretation even arises, your body registers experience as a felt sense. Every experience correlates to a matrix of sensations — largely outside of your conscious awareness.

These sensations — they are meant to move you.

When you restrain your response, the built-up tension has nowhere to go.

The thing is, those restraints did not arise randomly. Family systems and gender-based sociocultural conditioning likely dictate what you’ve been habitually restraining. Or what you haven’t allowed yourself to feel. And with repetition, you created an armour. You learned to block the fullness of your life force.
And that was for the sake of dignity and belonging — it always is.

Somatic work offers a way to discharge some of that built-up tension — while also tending to what keeps you feeling safe.
It starts with tuning into your body, finding where restriction lives, and directing your attention there — meeting the raw texture of it.

Within every contraction — every knot of bound-up tension — there is a pulse of aliveness.
I want to help you find that primordial pulse.

Book a discovery call

Other ways to show support:

Subscribe now

Buy me a coffee

Subscribe now

This is a journey I know from the inside.
Eight years ago, my identity lost its meaning.
It wasn’t a clean break.
I couldn’t let go of the life I knew. I couldn’t allow it to disappear. I had no alternative to step into. Life’s demands kept on pressing and compressing. I kept reaching back for who I had been—trying to do what she would have done. But my nervous system couldn’t handle it. My ability to act in the world—tanked.
What I thought was me was dissolving into nothingness.

This is the threshold

The constructs that organized your life stop holding—but nothing new has yet taken their place.

Read more

We know the heart not only as an organ, but as the seat of love and longing.
We know light and dark not only as physical phenomena, but as promise and grief.
The serpent that swallows its own tail. The sacred mountain at the center of the world. The tree whose roots reach into death and whose branches hold the sky.
These symbols don’t only appear as images. They organize themselves into mythology. The great flood. The hero who must die before he can return. The journey into the underworld.

Across cultures that never met, never traded a single idea, we find the same stories, the same symbols, the same shapes of meaning.
How did these arise? And what does it tell us about how we find our way to meaning?

These symbols were not constructed. They were recognized.
They carry meaning not as explanation, but as a felt sense.
A broken heart—that collapse in your chest—you already know it.

What makes a symbol universal is not that everyone agrees on its definition. It’s that it holds an essential embodied experience.

This essay is an invitation to follow meaning below the surface of reason, into the older language of symbols.

Subscribe now

Read more

Direction without wisdom is a hamster wheel. We keep moving, but we’re stuck inside a loop—pulled forward by promises that never quite arrive.

Sociocultural conditioning makes us believe that being rational is a strength, but being emotional is a weakness. So to stay in control and keep going, we learn to avoid difficult emotions, deflect them, and armour up to protect ourselves from feeling to much.
What’s implied is that we’re headed somewhere important—and that feeling too deeply would only distract us or derail us.
But where are we going? And who decided that this direction was worth taking?
These questions matter. Because the model of success we’ve inherited is failing us. We were told to chase achievement, status, and productivity. But what’s the point of all this striving if it leaves us fragmented, numb, and miserable? Why sacrifice our aliveness to uphold a capitalist, patriarchal system that thrives on our self-abandonment?

Subscribe now

Liberation begins with attunement—turning towards the parts of ourselves that we were taught to distrust and dismiss. It means listening deeply and giving voice to what has long been silenced.

The body is a site of memory and truth

Our minds simplify the vast complexity of life so we can function—but our bodies capture much more.
It’s a stream of sensations, subtle cues, and emotional data, that we don’t consciously grasp. And if we’re not equipped to welcome and allow these nebulous sensations, they don’t get their message across. They get suppressed. But they don’t disappear.
The unprocessed overwhelm gets stored in our nervous system and lingers in muscle, fascia, and breathing patterns. It shapes how we move and guard ourselves, all the whilst striving to move towards some illusionary goal based in compliance.

Attunement is a reclamation of your sovereignty

If you are looking outside of yourself for direction, thinking that your worth is in your output and in how well you perform within this paradigm, you are not free. You are stuck inside a loop, where standards only get higher, and the pressure more constraining.

Beginning to explore the realm of body wisdom is a reclamation of your sovereignty.
With the practice of somatic embodiment, you learn to trust internal cues. You learn to root down into your truth, rather than outsource your authority to external systems.

Embodiment means inhabiting yourself fully—not just intellectually, but viscerally.
It’s the practice of slowing down enough to notice what’s happening beneath the surface. A flutter in the belly, a clench in the jaw, a collapse in the chest—each sensation becomes a doorway into deeper knowing.
These physical signals are not obstacles to power; they are power.

When you attend to these stirrings, you give shape to what lives below words.
What was abstract becomes tangible.
What was overwhelming becomes specific.
And as you develop the capacity to stay with these sensations, without judging them as good or bad, you begin to discern your true boundaries, desires, and needs—not from theory, but from felt experience.

In a system that thrives on domination and control, choosing to feel, to listen, and to stay present is a form of resistance.
Giving voice to what was once silenced is not only a personal act of liberation—it is a collective one.
The more we reclaim our truth, the more we open space for others to do the same.
Regulated nervous systems co-regulate communities.
Healing is never just about the self. It transforms the world around us.

Too many subscriptions already? Here’s another way to show support:

buy me a coffee

Appropriation is distortion

Words don’t exist in a vacuum. They carry meaning based on the underlying sociocultural narrative.
When the storyline already idealizes self-reliance and control, detachment language points us further away from the relational nourishment we’re missing.
Most of us have already been repressing our fundamental need for care.

Rising above attachment needs in the pursuit of ultimate self-sufficiency—that’s not liberation. That’s conditioning rebranded as enlightenment.

Subscribe now

Read more

We pursue standards externally imposed. We take external validation as the compass. We fragment ourself to comply. But what we actually yearn for, deeper down, it’s not the trophy—it’s the felt sense of having arrived.
When we stay on the hamster wheel, running but never arriving, we train ourselves in perpetual reaching. When do we learn arrival?

Read more

Subscribe now

Chasing a better life, a better self—it’s an attempt to find safety in a system that abandons those who haven’t earned merit.
Proving your worth through measurable output is a survival strategy.
We pursue standards externally imposed. We take external validation as the compass. We fragment ourself to comply. But what we actually yearn for, deeper down, it’s not the trophy—it’s the felt sense of having arrived.

When we stay on the hamster wheel, running but never arriving, we train ourselves in perpetual reaching. When do we learn arrival?
Arrival is not a destination; it’s a somatic capacity.
If this pattern of perpetual seeking feels familiar, here’s a guided embodiment practice to help you land.

Read more

Subscribe now

You measure yourself, find yourself lacking, work harder. But you never arrive—the reward stays just out of reach, always on the other side of more struggle, obedience, and sacrifice.
This is being locked inside a loop of self-imposed suffering.

Read more

Growth is not linear.
We expect things to get progressively easier as we put in the work. But in reality, it often gets harder right before the real shift happens.

You build a new habit. You show up consistently. You notice positive benefits.
And then—suddenly—it feels pointless. The initial benefits become elusive. You start wondering if you were fooling yourself all along.

I’m here to tell you: this is not backsliding.
It’s actually the brink of change.

Subscribe now

Read more

Do I need to keep proving my worth for us to stay connected?
If I don’t write for a couple weeks, will you unsubscribe? Forget about me forever?

This touches on an old limiting belief: I don’t really exist unless I’m offering value.
But here’s the truth:
You cannot actually secure love and belonging through working harder.
Belonging is an inner felt sense that emerges through present moment awareness. You find it by staying present with yourself, even when it’s uncomfortable—or painful.
Dissociating into the next project (mirage) is only habituation—a way to avoid feeling the deeper longing that stirs under the surface.

Read more

This time of the year makes me want to hide a little.
But I’m choosing differently—I’m choosing to stay connected.
I want to bring you closer—by sharing a bit more of my story.
Not only to highlight my progress, but so you know:
I’ll meet you wherever you are.
No judgement. Just honesty and compassion.

Confidence was just a mask I learned to wear. Underneath, I had a terrible relationship with myself. I couldn’t feel my feelings or name what I needed. I just kept going.

I made everyone believe I was strong and independent.

Read more

Subscribe now

Fighting is something I know all too well.
The surge of heat. The narrowing awareness.
This hadn’t happened in a while. Perhaps the setup had been building for days—weeks—but I wasn’t prepared.
This fight left me trembling for days—unable to restore safety.

What else to do but dissociate?
When the threat feels permanent, it’s just too much to face.
Dissociation is an exquisite survival strategy—it dims awareness, softens sensation, and gives us just enough distance to catch a breath.

But in escaping the intensity of the moment, we also disconnect from the parts of ourselves that most need our care.

Read more

I hope you enjoy it. I’d love to know how it landed—message me in the group (or privately) to share your impression.

Until then, sending you my best wishes xx

Cassie

Read more

We often talk about meditation as the path to peace — as if stillness should come easily once we close our eyes. But for many people, stillness stirs the very things they’ve spent a lifetime keeping at bay.

Subscribe now

If meditation brings up anxiety and racing thoughts—or the opposite, a sudden numbness, as if you’re floating outside your body watching yourself—it’s not that you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign that your nervous system is protecting you.

What most meditation approaches overlook is the body’s wisdom: these protective responses aren’t obstacles, they’re information.

Somatic exploration asks for immense gentleness.
Because accessing your body’s wisdom also means touching the imprints of old wounds.

If you learned early on that love was conditional—that certain parts of you led to rejection, abandonment, or shame—then turning inward can feel threatening. Without proper pacing and support, it’s like asking someone to dive into deep water when they’ve never learned to swim.

This week, I’m offering a gentle guided audio for meeting the heart space — a practice to help you connect without overwhelm.

This is all about creating the safety in which feeling becomes possible again. We don’t pry open what’s been closed — we cultivate trust, until openness emerges on its own.

Find the practice here:

Read more

Grief is what happens when the world you stood on—turns out to have been made of air.

It’s not just the loss of a person—it’s the loss of a reality, a set of assumptions about how the world works.

Until loss tears through, we live by invisible beliefs: that if we do everything right, things will turn out okay; that the world is safe; that we can protect the people we love.

Grief exposes the lie in those quiet promises.

The story no longer holds. And most of us have never learned what comes next.

Subscribe now

You’re expected to move on, get back to work, back to yourself, back to productive functioning. But without rebuilding a foundation for meaning-making, this demand becomes an instruction to dissociate—to sever yourself from the parts that broke open.

We’re told that time heals all wounds, as if grief were a cut that closes on its own if you just don’t touch it. But time alone doesn’t heal—it just buries. And what gets buried doesn’t disappear. It becomes the unnamed thing that makes you grow cold in ways you can’t quite explain.

Numbness is not peace, it’s the white noise of a self that’s learned not to listen to its own breaking.

Performing normalcy requires that you focus on what you can control, and avoid what you cannot make sense of. But part of you knows the tenderness you’ve exiled. So to stay on track, you grow more rigid and further disconnected.

Moving on (in the Western sense) comes at the cost of your capacity to feel and inhabit this life fully. Because you can’t selectively numb.

When you close the door on pain, you close it on everything—on joy, on pleasure, on the full-throated presence that makes life feel like living.

The grief you didn’t feel doesn’t disappear—it waits. And when the next loss comes, it doesn’t arrive alone. It brings with it every unfinished mourning, every swallowed scream, every moment you had to be strong instead of shattered.

Every new loss unearths what was left behind.

You think you’re crying over a breakup, but you’re also crying for the parent who left, the friend who took their own life, and the version of yourself you had to abandon to survive.

This is why grief can feel so disproportionate, and so overwhelming.

Somatic integration is the way forward

When you are willing to fully experience the sensation of grief in your body, you discover that it’s less about what happened and more about how it pulls at strings already inside you—old wounds and unprocessed pain.

To untangle these strings, you have to stop narrating and start sensing. You have to drop beneath the mind’s frantic attempts to explain, to fix, to make meaning too soon.

Somatic inquiry invites you to stay with the raw physicality of the emotion—the way it moves and shifts, swells and recedes, the way it asks for your attention without promising resolution.

This goes deeper than what language or reason can convey. You’re meeting the root textures behind the emotion.

To open the gates for these sensations to flow, you express them—not through language, but through primal movement and sound.

This is ancient wisdom.

Meeting what grief has to reveal

I’ve been leaning into grief and welcoming the wisdom beneath the sorrow. And here is what I found:

Grief—the felt sense—inevitably pulls me back to a weeping inner child.
And she is asking to be held.
Not fixed. Not quieted. Held.

By letting myself really feel into that depth, the truth beneath the sorrow has made its way to the surface: I’m grieving a world where I belong.

That is the root of what aches in my body. And as much as I can take it into my own care, attune to my needs and hold myself with tenderness, I also know there’s a missing piece.

That’s the collective holding.

Grief was never meant to be private. Other cultures knew that processing loss calls for witnessing and consensual validation by relevant others. Loss shatters your reality—and reality is always co-created!

So instead of seeing grief as something to “work through” in private, let it lead towards care—towards the kind of connection that reminds us we were never meant to hold it all alone.

What could shift if we started using grief as a practice of remembering—of returning to what binds us to life and to each other?

Leave a comment

For more of my personal story:

Read this post

There was a version of you before this—one that seemed to function, at least on the surface. But masks don’t hold up well in the storm.

Many of us are initiated into transformation through tragedy—maybe a significant loss or a betrayal that shattered everything.

It’s the turning point when the identity you maintained for so long now becomes impossible to hold.

Subscribe now

The initiation is disorienting. As an identity falls, and the path ahead remains unknown, you are called to stand in the void—dark, formless, uncharted.

This void is terrifying. It forces you to face what was buried beneath the protective mask—a deep sense of inadequacy.

And now the shame tugs at you. You try to go back—rebuild the mask, get back on your feet. But the ground has shifted. Nothing feels the same anymore.

There is no going back. Your earlier self-concept no longer holds up. The illusion dissolved.

So now we’re here—in-between the old self that died and the new self that hasn’t yet fully formed.

This is a death and rebirth. And this kind of transformation doesn’t happen on the flip of a coin.

The emergent self, more authentic and true, only reveals itself one glimpse at a time. At first it is fleeting and unstable. It hasn’t yet found a secure anchor in the world.

That is usually when we tend to retreat—comfort ourselves in solitude. Because every time we step into the world, we are reminded of the expectations that shaped us in the first place.

But let me ask you this: If your authentic self only exists in isolation, how do you know it really exists?

The work of becoming requires being seen. Not by the world that shaped the old mask, but by someone who can witness what’s emerging without trying to direct it.

If you’re in this passage, I’d love to offer more personalized support via one-on-one coaching.