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musical environmentsThe care economy is an emerging model for supporting people, things, and processes we’d like to see more of in the world.
give to rykpeers, autists, human companions: lend me your cognitive architecture (ears are not enough).
what we now call “autism” originally described a way of thinking that its own framers acknowledged that everyone experiences.
If “autistic thinking” is something that everyone experiences, where is the line drawn between “everyone” and the autistic person? Is everyone temporarily autistic in the moments when they experience autistic thinking? Does a person become autistic when their thinking operates in autistic mode for a certain percentage of their experience? And if so, what percentage represents the threshold where a person can be called autistic as a label of status?
Can we pause here and reflect on how problematic this is? If this is the starting point for a field of study, and a classification of a segment of the population, let’s use critical thinking to ask what kind of change in perspective would bring this framework for a diagnosis into alignment with human nature — remembering that we’re talking about something that supposedly everyone experiences.
The term “autism” was coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), a white, European psychiatrist in the Freudian tradition, to refer to what he characterized as a tendency of social withdrawal among schizophrenic patients — a retreat into a “subjective world” of “illogical thought processes.” Bleuler worked within, and lent scientific authority to, a psychiatric establishment that implemented forced sterilization under hereditary-hygiene law, even while acknowledging that what he called “autistic thinking” is something that everyone experiences.
Pause and reflect on this. Ask yourself: if we’re talking about something that everyone experiences, why has the line between “normal” and “autistic” never been fixed?
Because it never needed to be logically sound. It simply needed to be administratively useful to an establishment already sorting populations by fitness to perform productivity in an increasingly industrialized world.
In Western scientific practice, the prescribed method is to cite and work from existing research. Existing work can be seen as a foundation to build on, or as a flawed model to be abandoned. At what junctures was Bleuler’s work built on, and at what moments was it abandoned for a more sustainable model? From what I’ve observed, the academic community has done some work to move the autism framework into a realm that aligns with the complexity of human nature — Kanner and Asperger extracted it from schizophrenia, Wing’s spectrum concept dissolved the hard boundary into a continuum, the neurodiversity paradigm reframed it as natural variation rather than disease. That being said, in the realm of institutional infrastructure — diagnostic manuals, disability determination, special-education law, insurance billing — we’re still working with the same racist, eugenicist, ableist framework that Eugen Bleuler articulated over a century ago. The spectrum got re-gridded into support-needs tiers; the line moved slightly, but it didn’t disappear.
Some frameworks cannot be patched. If we try to practice incremental change, the starting point might be too far a departure from natural processes to mold into a healthy framework. At some point, the critical thinker abandons the given model and starts from scratch. I don’t believe that work has been done — not in the places that are important. I see the gatekeeping infrastructure built on Bleuler’s premise as irredeemable. The recognition that neurodevelopmental variation is real, and universal in degree, is not the thing to abandon — it’s the thing worth building from. Abandoning that premise means we stop tying support to a diagnosis and start giving people what they actually need — support based on what someone’s dealing with day to day, not on some overarching designation that assigns them a lowered status. Only then can we begin to understand, accept, and include a diversity of human traits into the body of human behavior and expression, and contextualize variety in a way that serves the human project in an inclusive way—something that everyone experiences.
fitness, in the modern economy, is the ability to engage in any given task, for as little or as long as one is conscripted, without asking what the project contributes to;
propelled onward by a belief that the designers of the project have our collective interests in mind;
that the project is always becoming more refined;
and that today’s toxic inefficiencies are excusable, being that they contribute to our salvation as a species.
understanding this, my unfitness makes much more sense to me, and i embrace it wholeheartedly.
Our friend Tammy Zo (Pollard) needs our support. She is homeless, and in grave danger of losing her belongings, many of which are cultural archives and work that she has created herself. The fact that she needs our support is a consequence of our culture’s failure to maintain mutual support networks independent of institutional channels, and failure to recognize the long arcs of creative people in our communities—especially women—and their support needs.
I have written about this before, and will continue to do so. In healthy societies, where everyone knows one another and recognizes everyone as valuable, care is a distributed function of the economy—not merely transactional. Child-rearing is a community responsibility, not isolated within a nuclear family. People who function as culture-bearers are supported by people who function as food processors, and tradespeople, and caregivers.
In our modern society, each person is expected to be their own provider, caregiver, support person, as well as generating some economic surplus to feed the institutional economy. This is not sustainable, especially for many culture-bearers, whose sensory and cognitive architecture is often arranged to process a specific field of knowledge in a very deep way. People that are wired to do specific work are often pushed into work environments that are hostile to their nervous systems, and the burden of adaptation is placed on the individual rather than the workplace.
Some creatives are able to find support through project management—grant writing, proposals, partnerships that enrich institutions while meeting the needs of the creative person. Some are able to work this particular landscape to meet their personal needs along with that of their work. Unfortunately, even in the best of times, these processes are not easy for someone to manage alone—again, I’m emphasizing this idea of distributed care. In our current economy, cultural institutions that thrived for decades are being shuttered due to lack of funding. Tammy’s situation is the downstream consequence of this cultural drought.
Certain people are the sensory apparatus of the community. What sounds like a personal cry for help is actually an alert to the larger processes that are happening around us. We have often been trained to dismiss people asking for help as irresponsible, as disorganized, as failing to manage resources.
But if we understand that funding for creative and cultural institutions is hemorrhaging right now, (I can provide receipts if you’re interested), we will understand that the suffering and dire straits of our creative friends in our communities is not a matter of personal failing, but of a lack of scaffolding—we haven’t built in the horizontal networks that support us when the vertical infrastructure evaporates.
And furthermore, the burden falls more cruelly on women creatives, who are expected to provide emotional labor for their communities, while still remaining legible in their creative pursuits—which often require long periods of gestation (artworks and cultural curation projects require no less expenditure of energy than children). Women who are struggling are often perceived with less sympathy and understanding than their male peers, as their need is read as a failure of a provider of emotional support to provide. This is an unspoken agreement that is devastating in reality. Many will not recognize it, but for many, it is just the way every day is organized.
At some point, it would be a good idea to set up community institutions to provide support to creatives in times of need. In the meantime, we need to recognize moments when individuals need our support, and do what we can. There are a number of ways to support our friend in her time of need.
Thanks for listening, and please consider how you can be an agent of support for the culture and bearers of the community, who define our values and identities.
the etymology of the term ‘autism’ derives from an idea that a person with autistic traits is somehow isolated in a world of their own, that others can’t reach.
i would offer that this is exactly wrong, and a projection by an observer with a mindset built from a variety of assumptions that prevents them from understanding the way the observed person moves through the world.
the isolation being described is that of the observer, not the observed. an isolation from nature, and from processes that take place across long arcs, and within complex systems.
and this isolation prevents the observer not only from understanding the observed, but from understanding their own true nature, and the ways that certain qualities that appear awkward in a limited social context are vital for the human project as it plays out in relationship with nature, the earth, and the universe.
for this reason, i advocate for new language that acknowledges the contribution of the person who moves across a longer arc; whose body remembers what has always been important, even when people in the room have forgotten; whose mind forgets what is not important, even when the people in the room are catastrophizing about a missed deadline; whose presence requires the room to reassess what is important at every turn; whose character collects specific fields of information that, when recognized, enrich the community in unmonetizable ways.
so, i’m going to be speaking in awkward sentences, as i try to articulate the experience, from the inside, of a person who recognizes something of what is important; who recognizes and loves themselves and those around themselves; and who is unsatisfied with the direction that a large swath of humanity has taken—away from nature, and a harmonious relationship with the universe.
sometimes, in coming to our senses, it’s important to disengage from a compulsion to make sense. thank you for your attention to this matter.
This series explores human traits and behaviors that are pathologized in the modern Western office-industrial complex, with the intent to spark cross-cultural discussion, and reassessment of what it means to be divergent.
Two gait strategies, same anatomy, different verdicts—depending on what the ground is asking of the foot, and who’s asking the questions.
Toe-walking—prioritizing the ball of the foot in walking or running—does not appear in the DSM as such, but it is often used as a red flag to point to a possible diagnosis of autism—toe-walking correlates with a sizable subset of the autistic population. Let’s look at this phenomenon not as an individual trait, but as a response to an environment.
Emplaced-culture gait: where the foot meets varied, unmediated terrain—sand, root, gravel, cold stone, hot earth—a forefoot-first strike is adaptive, not a symptom. The ball of the foot reads the surface before committing weight to it, spring-loads the arch, and keeps the heel (a poor sensor, a good lever) out of the way until footing is confirmed. Populations who walk barefoot or minimally shod tend to show exactly this pattern. The ground has information in it, and the gait evolved to read that information continuously. Toe-first contact is like sensory antennae, extended forward. It is notable that many world cultures with a strong emphasis on running or walking over distance run barefoot or in sandals, using a toe-forward gait.
Portable culture gait: removes the variable terrain and replaces it with a manufactured constant: flat, predictable, shock-absorbed by shoe rather than by joint. Once the surface stops asking questions, heel-strike walking becomes viable—even efficient—because the environment is made invisible. The built environment doesn’t just tolerate rearfoot gait, it produces it, and then quietly promotes it to the definition of “normal.” Change what the environment offers, and you change which body-strategy counts as competent. The downside is the collapse of the body’s locomotor mechanism, arguably brought on by cushioning and a flat-footed gait, considering the West’s reliance on orthotics and adaptive footwear to compensate for the abandonment of a naturally adaptive gait.
When a child keeps toe-walking on a surface engineered to not need it, human behavior hasn’t changed—the semantic frame around it has. In an emplaced culture, toe-walking is terrain-reading. In a portable culture accustomed to a manufactured environment, with the terrain-reading no longer required, the same motor pattern reads as excess—unexplained, and therefore suspect, and therefore diagnostic. Idiopathic toe walking gets pathologized, and its strongest correlate—autism—gets folded in via the sensory-seeking hypothesis: forefoot strike and calf loading generate more proprioceptive signal per step.
Read with care, that’s not dysregulation: it’s the nervous system requesting the same ground-information that emplaced walkers require from the natural environment. In a sense, it is a refusal to abandon an adaptation to a natural environment, and to take for granted that the floor will always be flat.
Recognizing toe-walking as a somatic or behavioral difference isn’t wrong; it’s just wrong to fail to recognize that it is an adaptive mechanism being used across natural and constructed environments—and that there may be some somatic wisdom in maintaining this adaptation.
Portable culture manufactures a flat, silent world, then treats any body still listening for natural variation as broken.
Considering this, what do we have to learn from emplaced, barefoot cultures? What are we willing to give up in assuming that the future is a manufactured environment, that places no demands on the body to read the room?
There is something in the body that is always listening. Let’s run with that.
Many traditional cultures around the world—what I would call emplaced cultures—have sustained populations for millennia, within different watersheds, meeting different needs with different answers. Care distributed through community and across generations, calibrated to the place the community inhabits.
Western medicine arrives with its own language—what is right and observable in every case across place and time, with the body as the background—dismissing what it can’t quantify and trace to prior research. Its real achievement is mechanism. It can name an endocrine disorder, or sequence the removal of a tumor. Many traditional wisdom traditions had their own explanations for these conditions—accounts Western science now treats as unsatisfactory and obsolete.
But Western medicine is not famous for tracking complex systems. What environmental conditions produce disease and mental illness at population scale? What cultural practices sustain quality of life across a community? Western science is moving in those directions, but movement is slow.
Many traditional cultures solved these problems long ago, in the social organization itself—health is in how we live together, not in how many reps we do of an exercise. They simply didn’t pursue the technology needed to solve the tumor and the endocrine disorder—social order took precedence over bodily order. Different priorities, different unsolved problems.
The trade, plainly: traditional culture does 95% of the work of keeping a community healthy. Western medicine covers the remaining 5%—acute care—and offers almost nothing for the rest, beyond aphorisms about getting enough exercise and eating healthy. Western medicine is a scalpel. What’s happening is the scalpel is being used to excise whole communities to solve one liver disease.
What we’re seeing now is that traditional communities across the Global South are sending their people into Western medical training—for community service, but also for advancement, and for escape from poverty. In the process, traditional practices are being abandoned, either willfully or by neglect, in pursuit of this specialized 5% of care needs—missing that the other 95% was vital infrastructure, only invisible because it was unmonetized.
The question isn’t whether to let Western methods in. It’s how to let them in without letting them replace what they can’t see—infrastructure that was already doing work in spheres well beyond health. What strategies might result in sustainable culture with a net gain, rather than a trade?
The community might send someone already recognized as a healer to study advanced medical interventions for acute needs. Or a second person in the traditional care economy might be sent to work alongside the healer, rather than instead of them.
The boundary between emplaced and portable doesn’t need to be a wall. It only needs each side to keep its debts—emplaced culture answerable to land and ancestors, portable culture answerable to what it can actually prove.
The innovations Western culture offers can be enticing and addictive—like social media. A firm grounding in systems that have served communities across time keeps those innovations from pulling humanity off course.
I’m a bi-gender person—masc and femme together in parallel unison. Like a Tootsie Roll, a Twinkie, a Ho-Ho, or a KitKat, I have a more brittle, masc outer layer; and a creamy, femme inner core.
The femme part of me has been surprised when I have proposed activities to femme friends that I think of as normal and platonic, like getting together to braid one another’s hair or do nails or other grooming activities, along with gossip and food and music. The response I’ve gotten doesn’t tell me that the idea is being rejected because it came from someone with a masc presentation, but just that the idea itself feels icky or weird or frivolous, regardless of who proposed it.
I think we’ve reached a time of cultural compression when the the need to mask in public makes casual intimacy too costly—if we forget for a couple of hours that we’re supposed to be competing with one another, and stepping on one another’s shoulders and fingers and toes, we’ll miss an opportunity for social advancement. Moments of casual intimacy remind us of the brutality of the work environments we operate within, and since it seems that brutality is unavoidable, it is the intimacy that becomes the thing to avoid.
And since I experience this casual intimacy as a kind of vitamin—an important part of a balanced social diet—I recognize that we have created a condition where everyone is starved of something that would always be available if we would collectively let down our guard and stop performing invulnerability. We hunger for it, but someone’s rules say that we are only allowed to experience it within a contractually sanctioned relationship, so when we get feelings outside of those pigeonholes, there is a conflict—between the natural tendency toward connection, and the imposed imperative to suppress the connection.
This being so, I own that I will always be perceived as too much—”too familiar,” “flirty,” “inappropriately intimate,” “overly emotional,” “dramatic,” “too informal,”—simply because I refuse to accept the inevitability of the brutality that many people face in their work and social environments. I refuse to suppress the natural tendency toward connection. I refuse to impose a contractual constraint on where I experience intimacy. I feel it is actually my whole job to remind my community that productivity is not the goal, that free time is a virtue to be cultivated, and that casual intimacy is our actual settled and natural state.
That being so, I might describe the grief I feel about the loss of a loved one in the middle of a work meeting. I might express that an interaction with an especially loud and reckless motorcycle made me feel vulnerable when applying for a business license. I might point to the behavior of a person in a management position, and show how that person is taking an opportunity to punch down, rather than being accepting, inclusive, and supportive. “Too much” means “not silent,” and in spaces where we are expected to disappear, “not silence” equals “too much.”
And to be clear, what I am calling intimacy has nothing to do with sexuality or even physical touch. Intimacy is simply the willingness to return to our basic, true character in the presence of another, and to drop the mask that work and social navigation require of us. Intimacy is simply abandoning the performance of invulnerability for a moment or two. Intimacy is simply acknowledging the fiction of independence, and experiencing the wonder and joy of interdependence, even if only for a couple of moments.
At the present moment, I propose that the most radical and revolutionary act we can engage in (but the most powerful, since we can engage in it any time) is simply the act of casual intimacy—when we acknowledge that each of us has a way that we care for ourself, and that we could just as easily care for one another in the same moment.
As we brush our hair, realize that we could be engaging in casual intimacy by brushing someone else’s hair. As we manage our pet’s excrement on a walk, realize that we could be engaging in casual intimacy by helping a loved one who needs support to manage their excrement. As we feel a moment of grief for the loss of a loved one, recognize that we could just as easily feel a moment of grief alongside a friend who is experiencing a similar moment.
I propose that the more we engage in casual intimacy, the less we demand that our contractual relationships fulfill our needs for intimacy, and that that quality in itself is liberating to both sides of our relationships.
So, on that note: let’s get together soon to braid each other’s hair, or do our nails together, and have some snacks and music and gossip time, and maybe cry about our dog that just died, or about the parent that doesn’t remember us that we are caring for.
In this economy, this is the type of care that cannot be monetized, and that is only available to the privileged. Let’s privilege one another with casual intimacy, and invite whomever we can into that state of privilege—because if everyone is included in it, it is no longer a privilege, but a right—simply a natural state of being, around which we organize ourselves, around everyone’s comfort, and not just our own.
Normalize casual intimacy.
all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us.
the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us. it requires that power be centralized in such a way that concerns about water and land use are deprioritized. it requires that people who don’t have our best interests in mind influence elections. it requires that we relinquish our rights to our own ideas in the tos agreement required to use it.
ai is not local: it requires centralized control of a vast network of resources from around the globe. it doesn’t fit in a backpack.
ai is not democratic: the algorithms that deliver it’s results are designed by a small team that does not answer to us. it doesn’t respond to community review.
ai is not neutral: it’s knowledge base is a collection of writings that represents centuries of colonizers writing about encounters with beings deemed lesser. it doesn’t weight indigenous voices higher.
ai is not embodied: nothing in its database includes information that can only be experienced through the senses. it didn’t smell what you smelled.
ai has not experienced loss: it can tell you what grieving people have said, but it cannot experience their pain, and console you in the ways that only someone who has experienced loss can console you. it can’t adjust the way you’ve adjusted.
ai has never attended a birth, nor tasted the final breath of a loved one. it doesn’t know the poem your mother needed to hear for comfort.
ai is a performance by someone who was never there, but who requires you to hand over all rights to land, water, minerals, species diversity, diplomatic nonpartisanship, labor justice, bioregional congruity, indigenous stewardship, ecosystem integrity, economic equity, cultural heritage, family legacy, intellectual architecture, emotional elaboration, and environmental renewal.
but it’s so convenient. i’ll give it that.
There’s a mindset I keep seeing—in Buddhist sanghas, autism advocacy, establishment political discourse. I call it ‘cognitive centrism’—inhabiting a kind of middle ground, not because one felt their way there, but because they computed it. Like cognitive empathy: decode, then perform the answer. Here’s what it looks like:
Someone defending an argument gets confronted with some element of it that is clearly biased or harmful in some way: and instead of recognizing the bias, they average it away. “It’s just a tool, depends how it’s used.” “Complicated legacy.” “Incremental change.” Not malice—more like a reflex. It gets you to the neighborhood of fair, but it never actually results in justice.
Why it won’t move under pressure: it’s not holding an opinion, it’s holding a posture: suspension of judgment. “Don’t judge the tool—it’s just doing its job.” It’s a kind of adaptive compartmentalization, aka spiritual bypass. You can hand it more evidence of the tool’s bias forever, but evidence isn’t the input it’s built to take. “You don’t want to know how the sausage gets made” is the operative logic here.
The principle of charity—give the tool the benefit of the doubt in all cases—gets redeployed to make assessment of the tool unreachable. “It’s just a tool” doesn’t just interpret the DSM charitably. It moves the DSM one level up, to a place evidence can’t reach. Likewise, the teacher is not judged for their methods; the party is just gathering consensus. It’s the sincerity that makes its effectiveness as a thought-stopper durable. And dangerous.
Does this mean every accusation destabilizes the institution—that we accommodate every harm as if it delegitimizes the frame? No. It means the accusation gets the same weight the tool got by default. Currently, the tool is presumed innocent past evidence, and the accusation deemed exaggerated before it’s heard. That’s not two neutral positions—it’s asymmetry, running both ways. The fix isn’t reversing it. It’s judging each on its own merits, and refusing to punch down.
The corrective: redirect the benefit of the doubt—not to the tool, but to whoever the tool lands on.
In sangha: stop protecting the teacher’s legacy. Protect the student who was in the room. The lineage doesn’t need your benefit of the doubt—she does.
In diagnosis: stop defending the DSM’s neutrality. Defend the person it mislabeled. The manual isn’t hurt by scrutiny. The misdiagnosed patient is hurt by the denial of scrutiny.
In party politics: stop calling it consensus-building. Ask who consented, and who just got averaged in. The party isn’t harmed by the question. The constituent is telling you where harm landed.
Benefit of the doubt isn’t wrong—it’s just often aimed one level too high. Aim it down, and the people who need it are served.
We just accidentally corrected the mistake of trickle-down economics. Sit with that.
My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace or a grid-based schedule. They often miss appointments due to oversleeping, and sometimes sleep for periods that don’t align with respectable industrial grid time.
They are highly engaged in any task at hand, but have difficulty playing the long game of connecting with a regular schedule. They pick up new skills very quickly, but express little interest in developing any of those skills into something that, in a modern context, looks like a career.
The environments they express the most affection for are highly cooperative: soccer is a big one; skateboarding in community, where peers are moving together, both in synchronous and asynchronous formations; making public art in strategically complex spaces, that require collaboration to envision, coordination to plan, and cooperation to execute. They are the epitome of the team player, as long as the team has a clear plan that serves the collective need for transparent and direct expression of experience in a creative and innovative way.
My child’s challenges have moved them toward strategies to mitigate those challenges, and cannabis has been a recurring strategy that serves some need.
As an engaged parent, who is trying to nurture their adult child’s independence, while managing my alarm when witnessing behaviors that appear problematic, or as leading toward future failure to integrate into the workplace, I’ve been trying to make sense of what I’m seeing: a young person who is fiercely dedicated to their friends; who takes pride in a complex task well-executed; who resists being pigeonholed into existing categories of social, ideological, economic, or aesthetic legibility; and who sincerely wants to play a meaningful role in their community, despite repeated experiences of mismatch with established academic and occupational cultures.
Considering all of this, I’ve been unsatisfied with the ‘just say no’ or ‘avoid this substance because of the potential dangers involved’ frameworks of personal discipline, relative to what I see as cannabis use as substance-scaffolding.
I ask instead, “How is this scaffold serving their needs,” and “what is this person seeking to satisfy, according to the tendencies of their nervous system?”
Asking these questions, and exploring the range of possible resolutions, has caused me to rethink everything I know about individual competence, self-medication, and utility-within-community.
Here’s the story that unfolds in my brain, starting with trying to understand my child’s use of cannabis.
Question: A subset of neurodivergent people find cannabis to be highly regulating. Using current diagnostic frameworks, would we be able to reverse engineer this mechanism and suggest alternative supports for regulation?
Answer (from multiple channels): Diagnostic frameworks don’t code this directly—no DSM category for “cannabinoid-responsive regulation phenotype”—but the mechanistic literature gives us enough to reverse-engineer some plausible pathways, and each one maps to a non-cannabis lever.
The candidate mechanisms, each with its alt-support:
Considering this data, relative to the questions that framed my inquiry, here’s how I connect the dots when I choose to view my child as perfectly-abled, rather than disabled, and here’s how I attempt to contextualize this for my community.
I compiled this explanation of how cannabis helps regulate the neurodivergent nervous system. This all maps very cleanly onto our child’s character, and shows why they miss soccer so much (missing as ‘longing for,’ and not ‘fails to show up for.’ I think you get my meaning, but it’s good be precise where language suggests multiple meanings).
This all points to running (‘rhythmic bilateral movement,’ ‘sustained aerobic movement’), with intense interest-based focus (‘structured monotropic focus,’ ‘high-engagement movement’) and cooperative participation (‘high-engagement movement,’ ‘body doubling’) as being the the regulation supports they are reaching for, or the activities that they are predisposed to seek in making their character meaningful in a human community engaged in dialogue with a natural environment.
Basically, our child shows the collection of ecological adaptations that would enable ice-age hunter-gatherers to hunt and bring down a wooly mammoth, as a source of food and raw materials for clothing, shelter, and tools. Mammoths were herd animals, much larger than humans, with thick skins and wooly coats that were very difficult to pierce with the projectiles of the time—wood or bone projectiles that were either sharpened or had separate affixed bone or stone tips specialized for cutting/piercing.
Bringing down a mammoth would require a high degree of coordination and sustained movement by a group of humans—to first isolate an animal from the herd; bombard it with a number of projectiles, none of which would be able to kill the animal on its own, but only weaken it when applied in numbers; and then chase the animal until it was weak enough to be able to approach directly, to apply severing cuts with stone knives at strategic points, to bring on death. Then, the animal had to be processed fairly quickly, before bacteria, insects, and scavengers moved in to take their share.
This coordinated activity would involve great risk-taking, and sublimation of fear-response. In other words, badass individuals engaged in a life-or-death struggle to meet the needs of their community.
Engaging in this way would have resulted in a huge output of energy in a specific time period, that would likely extend beyond one cycle of dawn-to-dusk; which could not be segmented into work hours that resemble modern industrial time cycles of work and rest; by an individual who could literally measure their life by their proximity to such a resource as a mammoth herd. The individuals involved in this project would have needed extended periods of rest to recover from the endeavor, perhaps spanning multiple day-night cycles; and the community would have been happy to oblige, considering the benefit of their energy expenditure to the community.
in the context of domesticated society, none of our child’s particular traits make sense. but our period of domestication has been a tiny blip in the overall arc of the human project. human evolution, and adaptation to changing environments, is a very long and slow process, relative to our understanding of adapting to environmental changes within our lifetimes.
Considering those changes, i hope we can find ways to recognize our child’s unique gifts as adaptations that are valuable to the community; to recognize the range of skills required to make the human project work; and to rediscover how a person with these natural predispositions is a valuable contributor to their community — because of, and not in spite of, their characteristic rhythms and sensibilities.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and thank you for your cooperation in this project of nurturing a unique person to be their best self in the rapidly-shifting priorities of life in modern industrial society.
big loves,
parent of a mammoth hunter