What if the happiest humans who ever lived had no money, no government, and no ambition?
I know that sounds like a provocation. But stay with me, because over the last two weeks something has been quietly dismantling my understanding of progress — and I think it might dismantle yours too.
It didn’t come from a book. It didn’t come from a billionaire on a stage at Davos. It came from a group of people who have lived on this land for longer than any culture on Earth. People that most of the West has never heard of. And people who have heard of them have called them “primitive.”
They are the San people of Africa.
And what I learned from them might be the most important thing I write this year.
The thought experiment that changes everything
Before I get to San, I want you to try something. It’s a thought experiment, and it’s not a light one. It’s the kind of question that, if you sit with it long enough, starts to rewire how you think about civilization itself.
Here it is.
If you could go back in time and be born into any culture, in any era of human history — but you had to come back as a random person. Not the king. Not the nobleman. Not the person with the right gender or the right skin color. Just a random human being in that society. You could come back as a woman. As a slave. As a member of a persecuted minority. As anyone.
Which civilization gives you the best odds of actually being happy?
Think about it.
Ancient Greece during the age of Pericles? Maybe — if you came back as a wealthy male citizen. But there were tens of thousands of slaves who built the Parthenon, and women had no legal rights. Roll the dice wrong, and your golden age is somebody else’s nightmare.
America in the 1950s? Sure — if you happened to be white, male, and straight. Otherwise, you’re drinking from a separate fountain.
The advanced Muslim Abbasid Empire in 12th-century Spain? A genuine golden age of science, art, and tolerance. But still, constant wars and battles with Christian Spain.
I started asking this question to historians, to thinkers, even to multiple AI systems. And the answers were fascinating. Modern Scandinavia kept coming up. The Abbasid Caliphate. Periclean Athens. But then there was one unlikely candidate that surfaced again and again.
The San people. Anytime before the 21st century. In three different AI models (Claude, OpenAI, Kimi), the San Culture came in the Top Ten.
Of all the cultures that have ever existed on this planet — cultures that built pyramids and parliaments and empires — the one where you could come back as anyone and almost surely live a dignified, equal, and connected life… was a group of hunter-gatherers roaming the savannahs of southern Africa.
That stopped me cold.
Because here’s the fascinating thing. This culture is the longest unbroken culture we have, dating back tens of thousands of years. And mostly unchanged.
Writing this from Namibia & Botswana
I’m writing this from a hotel room in Botswana. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been traveling across Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe — watching wildlife that feels almost mythological, standing in landscapes that look untouched by time, and learning about a continent that many of us in the West have come to severely misunderstand. Or worse — to underestimate entirely.
Last week, I wrote to you about what female elephants taught me about leadership. About how the matriarch leads not through force but through memory. About how nature, across species, keeps arriving at the same answer: wisdom over dominance.
This week goes deeper.
This week gets uncomfortable.
Because the San don’t just challenge how we lead. They challenge how we live. They challenge what we call progress. And they hold up a mirror to the modern world that, honestly, I wasn’t prepared for.
The oldest culture you’ve never heard of
If you haven’t heard of the San, you might know the term “Bushmen.” That’s what the West has called them for centuries. But that word carries the stench of colonialism — it comes from the Dutch bossiesman, meaning “bandit” or “outlaw,” a name given to them by the very people trying to destroy them.
The San have their own identity. And it goes back further than almost anything.
We’re not talking about a few hundred years. We’re not even talking about a few thousand. Genetic evidence suggests the San lineage diverged from other modern humans somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Their culture has been continuous for at least 20,000 years. Some scholars argue it’s the oldest living culture on Earth.
Let me put that in perspective. The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids about 4,500 years ago. Ancient Greece peaked around 2,500 years ago. The Roman Empire rose and fell. The Renaissance came and went. The industrial revolution, the digital revolution — all of it — and the San were already ancient when those civilizations were young.
We built progress. And lost happiness.
They never had what we call progress. And may never have lost what we’re desperately trying to find.
6,000-year-old maps of the mind
In Damaraland, Namibia, I stood in front of rock paintings left by San ancestors over 6,000 years ago.
I expected something crude. Stick figures. Basic hunt scenes.
That’s not what I found.
These were sophisticated. They depicted animals and watering holes, yes — but they also depicted something far more startling: altered states of consciousness. Shamans in trance. Humans transforming into animals. Maps of inner worlds that were as real to the San as the physical landscape around them.
See the Lion at the bottom with the extended tail. That’s not representing a physical lion. It represents the Shaman entering the consciousness of the Lion to gain insights on the world around him. This was breathwork and trance states 6,000 years ago.
The San didn’t just survive in the desert. They built a civilization of the mind. While we were still millennia away from writing our first philosophical texts, they were already exploring the architecture of consciousness — and painting what they found on rock walls.
The moment I didn’t expect
A few days later, I visited a small San school in Namibia. I sat down to greet the children, expecting maybe a few shy smiles. Some polite curiosity.
Instead, the children rushed toward me.
They surrounded me — laughing, reaching out, completely unafraid. And then they started touching my beard. Gently. Carefully. Almost reverently, like they were discovering a new texture that didn’t exist in their world.
Image shared with respect and permission from the Ombili Foundation that runs this school in Namibia
It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. About a dozen kids, all stroking my chin, giggling, fascinated. And in that moment, it clicked:
They had never seen a beard before.
What a beard might reveal about violence
Now here’s where things get genuinely fascinating.
There’s a hypothesis in evolutionary biology — still debated, but compelling — that beards may have evolved partly as protection. Studies have shown that facial hair can absorb and distribute the force of a blow to the jaw, reducing the chance of a fracture by as much as 30%. In environments where male-to-male violence was common, this would have been a significant survival advantage. Over thousands of generations, men in violent cultures would have been selected for thicker facial hair.
So think about what it means when an entire culture barely has beards.
The San are known to be one of the least violent societies in human history. No wars. No armies. No glorification of dominance. Anthropologists who have studied them describe them as “fiercely egalitarian” — not passively peaceful, but actively committed to preventing any individual from rising above the group.
And possibly — even at a biological level — they carry the evidence of tens of thousands of years without the kind of violence that shaped the rest of the human family.
Some evolutionary biologists suggest that their faces may be telling a story their culture has been living all along.
An operating system that actually works
If you’ve read my book, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, you know I think about human behavior in terms of operating systems. Every civilization runs on one — a set of models of reality and systems for living that determine how people think, act, and organize themselves. I call the outdated, unquestioned rules in these systems Brules — bullsh*t rules. And most of the Brules we carry about what makes a “successful” society come from civilizations that lasted a few hundred years at best.
The San operating system has been running for tens of thousands of years. And it breaks almost every rule the modern world takes for granted.
No hierarchy. The San have no chiefs, no permanent leaders, no one who accumulates power over others. Leadership is fluid and contextual — whoever has the knowledge the moment requires takes the lead. A skilled hunter leads during the hunt. A healer leads during the ceremony. Then they step back into the group. No pedestals. No thrones. No corner offices.
Men and women are genuinely equal. Not in the performative way modern societies talk about equality — where we write policies and still pay women less. In the San world, men and women hold distinct roles that are equally vital and equally respected. The men hunt. But the women are the navigators. They know where the water sources are hidden beneath dry riverbeds. They track the movement of game across vast stretches of savannah. They know which plants heal, which nourish, which kill. When the tribe moves — and they move constantly, following the game — it’s the women’s knowledge that keeps everyone alive.
If you read last week’s newsletter on female elephants, you’ll recognize the pattern. In elephant herds, the matriarch leads because she remembers where the water is. Among the San, the women carry the same knowledge. Nature keeps arriving at the same answer, across species, across millennia: memory and wisdom over force and dominance.
Everything is shared. When a hunter makes a kill, the tribe moves its portable shelters to the site. They feast together. Then they move again. They’ve been doing this for 10,000 years. There is no accumulation. No identity tied to what you own. No hoarding. This isn’t poverty — it’s a design choice. The San solved an equation that modern economists are still struggling with: beyond a certain point, more stuff doesn’t make you happier. They figured this out before the wheel was invented.
Insulting the meat
Now here’s the part that really broke something in me.
The San have a practice that anthropologist Richard Lee documented called “insulting the meat.” It is, without exaggeration, one of the most brilliant social technologies I’ve ever encountered.
Here’s how it works. A hunter goes out. He tracks an animal — sometimes for days. He makes the kill. He comes back to camp. And instead of being celebrated, instead of anyone saying you’re incredible — everyone, including the hunter himself, downplays the kill.
“That? That skinny old thing? Barely worth eating.”
“Look at that pathetic animal. You call that a hunt?”
And the hunter joins in. He laughs about his mistakes. Jokes about how the giraffe nearly trampled him because he tripped over his own feet. He makes himself small — on purpose.
This isn’t cruelty. It’s not false modesty. It’s a social technology designed to prevent the most destructive force any community can face: unchecked ego.
An elder from the group explained it like this: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way, we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
We cool his heart and make him gentle.
Forty thousand years of social cohesion. Built on a single insight: ego is the enemy of community.
Now hold that in your mind. And think about the kind of leaders we celebrate today.
The ego problem we refuse to see
We are living in an era that glorifies the opposite of everything the San built.
We amplify ego. We reward dominance. We build pedestals for individuals who speak about power as though volume equals vision. We have world leaders who threaten to wipe out entire civilizations and face no consequence.
In the San culture, this doesn’t stand. It can’t stand. Their entire social operating system is designed to prevent exactly this — the elevation of any single ego above the group.
Last week, I wrote about female elephants and how nature chose wisdom over dominance. This week, the San are showing me the same pattern, but in human terms: civilizations that glorify ego eventually collapse under the weight of it. Civilizations that regulate the ego endure.
So I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable question: What if we have this fundamentally wrong? What if the future of humanity isn’t in glorifying certain individuals, but in equality? What if the world needs less of the strongman archetype and more of the leadership model that nature — and the San — arrived at independently?
Less ego. More community. More women in positions of power. More leaders who foster connection rather than division.
The San figured this out before the Bronze Age. And we still haven’t caught up.
The fire, the dance, and the oldest technology of consciousness
One evening in Namibia, a San guide walked me through their shamanic healing rituals. And it felt like stepping into another dimension of human experience. I didn’t witness the healing, but my guide explained it to me via a mural on the wall of a San School in Namibia.
The San have healers — both men and women — who enter altered states of consciousness through what’s known as the trance dance. Women sit in a circle around a fire, clapping and singing medicine songs that they’ve known since childhood. The healers dance around the periphery, sometimes for hours, until a spiritual energy the San call n/om rises through their bodies. It starts in the belly, rises through the spine, and then the healer crosses over into what they describe as another reality.
My guide described a ritual where…as the “patient” goes into a trance, the healer heats a knife in the fire until it’s red hot. He then plunges the knife into the patient and pulls it out. When the knife is pulled out, there is no scar, there is no wounding. The patient also experiences no pain. The illness is then healed.
You will see this in the mural above. One shaman gently caresses the woman while the shaman behind her is about to plunge a knife into her.
In this state, healers touch the sick and draw illness from their bodies. They mend disputes. They restore the social fabric of the group. The San describe it as “arrows of sickness” being pulled from the community and flung into the darkness.
My guide explained to me that his grandfather, a San shaman, still performs this healing ritual today.
By the time San adults reach maturity, roughly half the men and a third of the women have become healers. This isn’t a priesthood reserved for the elite. It’s distributed. Communal. Available.
The rock paintings I saw — 6,000 years old — depicted exactly this. Shamans in trance. The boundary between human and animal is dissolving. Consciousness expanding beyond the body.
We in the West tend to dismiss this as superstition. But I’ve spent two decades studying consciousness, meditation, and human performance. I’ve built Mindvalley on the premise that transcendent practices — the Silva Method, meditation, altered states — are not fringe experiences but essential human technologies. And what the San developed isn’t primitive. It’s the original technology of consciousness. It’s been running, unbroken, for longer than any other system on Earth.
We think we invented mindfulness. The San have been practicing it for 20,000 years.
What I learned building Mindvalley
This brings me to something personal.
When The Code of the Extraordinary Mind hit number one globally in 2017, I had a choice. I could lean into being “the guru.” Build the personal brand. Become the center of the platform. Every incentive in the modern world pointed that direction — because our systems reward exactly that kind of ego amplification.
I chose to break the model.
Instead of positioning myself as the singular voice, I opened Mindvalley to hundreds of teachers. Different perspectives. Different modalities. Even ideas that conflict with my own. Because I believe that truth doesn’t belong to one person. It emerges from many.
Compare this to the guru model that dominates the personal development world — where a single personality becomes the brand, the doctrine, the untouchable center. Some of those gurus built grandiose names for themselves and then turned up in the Epstein files. That’s what happens when ego goes unchecked. The San would have seen it coming.
That decision to distribute authority rather than concentrate it changed everything — not just for the company, but for me. Because the moment you remove ego from the center of leadership, you create space for something the San have always known is more powerful: community.
I am because we are
There’s a word that echoes across southern Africa. In Botswana, they call it botho. In South Africa and much of the Bantu-speaking world, it’s ubuntu. The translation sounds simple, but it contains an entire philosophy of what it means to be human:
I am because we are.
Not “I think, therefore I am” — the Cartesian formula that built the entire Western model of selfhood on the isolated individual mind. But something fundamentally different: I exist because of my connection to you. My humanity is not mine alone. It is something we create together.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it like this: “Ubuntu is not ‘I think therefore I am.’ It says rather: ‘I am a human because I belong. I participate. I share.'”
The San embody this more deeply than perhaps any culture in history. When a healer enters trance to draw out sickness, they’re not treating an individual — they’re healing the community. When the tribe insults the meat, they’re not putting down the hunter — they’re protecting the collective from the cancer of ego. When men and women share leadership based on who holds the right knowledge for the moment, they’re not being “progressive.” They’re running an operating system that’s been tested and optimized across more generations than any civilization on Earth.
The future is moving toward them
Now layer something else onto all of this.
AI.
Over the next decade, we are heading toward a world where work becomes optional for many. Where universal basic income shifts from theory to inevitability. Where ownership starts to lose its meaning because access becomes abundant, and the cost of goods approaches zero. Where the game we’ve built our identities around — accumulation, status, dominance — begins to dissolve.
In other words, whether we realize it or not, the future is starting to look less like modern capitalism and more like a campfire in the Kalahari.
Shared resources. Fluid roles. Community over status. Identity rooted not in what you own, but in who you are to others.
We are drifting — some of us kicking and screaming — back toward something ancient.
And the most important thing I can tell you for the next ten years is this: be careful who you follow. Avoid egocentric leaders. Vote for people who foster community rather than division. The world doesn’t need more strongmen on pedestals. It needs more leaders who understand, at a bone-deep level, that their power belongs to the group.
The San knew this before they had a written language. We’re going to have to re-learn it with all of ours.
The question that won’t leave me
So I sit here in Botswana, about to fly home. And one question keeps looping through my mind, and I can’t make it stop.
What if the most advanced civilization in human history wasn’t the one that built the tallest buildings, the fastest computers, or the most destructive weapons?
What if it was the one that figured out how to keep every single member of the group — regardless of gender, regardless of role — fed, healthy, equal, and connected? For longer than any other culture on the planet?
What if we didn’t evolve forward, but sideways — gaining technology while losing something essential about how to be human together?
We optimized life. And forgot how to live.
But the blueprint for something better has been here all along. In a place where children have never seen a beard, because they’ve never needed protection from each other. Where a hunter comes home with a kill and the first thing his people do is laugh at him, because they know that the moment his ego grows, the community dies. Where healers dance themselves into another dimension to keep their people whole. Where the oldest woman in the group holds more authority than any king, because she remembers where the water is.
I am because we are.
Maybe it’s time we remembered that.
If this sparked anything in you, take a moment to leave a comment below—I read them all.
Vishen
PS: Everything I wrote about in this newsletter – community over ego, shared learning over guru worship, the idea that human beings thrive when they grow together rather than alone — that’s exactly what Mindvalley U was built to be.
Every year, we bring together people from over 100 countries to live, learn, and grow side by side for two full weeks. Not in a lecture hall. Not behind a screen. In person. Families, entrepreneurs, artists, seekers, all eating together, learning together, raising their kids together in a pop-up community that, honestly, feels closer to how humans were designed to live than anything the modern world typically offers.
There are no pedestals at Mindvalley U. No single guru on a stage telling you what to think. There are hundreds of teachers, dozens of perspectives, and a community that operates on the same principle I saw in the Kalahari: I am because we are.
This year, we’re in Tallinn, Estonia, from July 20 to August 2, 2026. If anything in this newsletter stirred something in you, this is where you come to live it.
Featured image shared with permission from the Ombili Foundation (instagram: @ombili_foundation_namibia) that helps preserve San Culture.
264 Responses
Thank you. I’ve been following Mindvalley for nearly ten years and taken several classes. I am a photographer/writer/yoga teacher and am taking energy medicine classes now. I appreciate this post very much. I follow the natural laws outlined in ” The Whole Elephant Revealed: Insights Into the Existence and Operation of Universal Laws and the Golden Ratio,” by Marja de Vries. Have you read this book?
Vishen, this really stayed with me.
What struck me most isn’t just the San as a culture, but how their way of life naturally regulates the human condition, especially ego. It feels like they built in safeguards we’re only now realizing we need.
Before starting Æthos™, I spent 10 years at Tesla leading some of the most underperforming teams across different markets. My role was to transform performance, but what I found was that performance only changed when people did.
When I left the company last year, I started reflecting on what actually worked across all those teams.
Not tactics. Not incentives. A pattern.
A formula I had been using, often without realizing it, to help people unlock something within themselves. Something that translated across personalities, roles, and environments.
I began to see it clearly:
1
A meaningful, heart-based goal turned into a question.
This becomes the center point.
3
Three pillars of inspired action:
Story (your hero’s journey)
State (your inner condition and flow)
Strategy (how you move your energy through time)
7
Seven levels of “why.”
A sequence of questions that pulls you out of surface thinking and into deeper truth. Around the seventh layer, something shifts. You move from the head into the heart.
12
Twelve stages of transformation.
The hero’s journey. Not a concept, but something we cycle through again and again.
I used to ask my teams something simple:
What is the question, or series of questions within you, that leads you to an answer like “we must go to Mars”?
Because that level of conviction doesn’t come from a single thought. It comes from a structure like this.
And I’d tell them, return to these questions every quarter. Not just to get through struggle or doubt, but to transform it into meaning, purpose, and aligned action.
What’s been interesting is how this all connects.
1, 3, 7, 12.
Together they form 23. Add the observer, and you get 24.
That sparked something for me around reflection and inversion.
It reminded me of Leonardo da Vinci and the Vitruvian Man.
Da Vinci wrote much of his work in mirror script, meant to be read in reverse. Almost like a reminder that perspective matters, and that what we’re seeing may not be the full direction of truth.
If 24 represents the inner world, then 42 reflects the outer. It brought me back to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
What if the answer is perspective?
What if we’re not just moving forward, but also remembering.
That’s what this has started to feel like. Not invention, but recognition.
I wanted to translate what I learned into tools for everyone. It started as a book on the neuroscience of self-leadership, but I’ve come to realize it’s really about healing.
Your blog honestly invigorated that mission.
And something else became clear to me along the way.
Most screen-dependent technology is designed from a very specific question:
“What is the answer out there?”
It conditions us to believe that clarity, happiness, and direction are external discoveries.
But through applying first principles thinking, something shifted for me.
As I improved the quality of my own questions, I realized the answers I was searching for weren’t external. They were already within me.
And if I could discover that for myself, I could help others do the same.
Not by giving them answers, but by giving them better questions.
I didn’t want people relying on me. I wanted patterns of questions to guide them back to themselves.
That’s where the direction of what we’re building changed.
Because the technology we have today, especially screen-based, is optimizing for novel seeking. Constant input. Dopamine. Short attention cycles.
It pulls us outward.
But the most alive we feel is during novel connection. When unrelated ideas come together. When something clicks internally.
That’s creativity. That’s awareness.
So the question became:
What if technology could augment that instead?
That’s what we’re building with a.Journey™ by Æthos™.
A screenless AI system designed to augment human technology, not replace it.
A journal. A pen. A hat. A water bottle.
Simple tools, integrated with AI, that guide someone inward. Help them refine their thinking. Strengthen their metacognition.
Not to give them answers, but to reflect their own questions back to them more clearly.
Then bring them back into practice:
Silence.
Inspired action.
Meditation.
Breath.
Not replacing anything ancient. Just translating it.
Because at the core, it’s still the same:
Pen. Paper. Breath. Ritual.
A way to return.
Your point about “insulting the meat” really hit. That level of ego regulation doesn’t exist in modern systems. Today, we reward ego, amplify it, and scale it.
That’s where AI becomes a real question. Not the technology, but the human using it.
One of the most important lessons I’ve held onto came from Ram Dass. He said it’s immoral to remove someone’s suffering. Instead, you give them the tools to transform it within themselves.
That shifted everything for me.
We’re not here to heal each other. We’re here to be centers. Each person, one question away from unlocking something already within them.
The truth is, we’re all healers.
The challenge now is making that accessible again.
Your piece didn’t feel like a reflection on the past. It felt like a signal for what we can’t afford to lose as we move forward.
If this resonates, I’d genuinely value the chance to connect and share more with you.
Vishen, thank you for a wonderful blog. Currently I’m struggling with emotional outbursts while looking down on me and my abilities. I believe that I am been planted by divine for a reason at the same time I am not putting any effort to grow.
Sometimes I truly feel that my ego is stronger than my efforts and I go into silence instead of action.
I have been with mindvalley for about 8 years now and it is just there barely scrapping any of my…..!!!???
I am glad you are finally getting there, Vishen. The blog you wrote a few years ago insinuating Trump might just be a good person put me off following you stuff but this caught my eye, for a reason (as always). You’ll be familiar with Hisami/Jeffrey Allen’s Spirit Mind work and the ‘overheated Material Mind’ and many others who point to this new/old way of being and living. It’s not about going ‘back’, that’s a material mind concept, it’s about being Kind, and that starts with ourselves. I spend a lot of time in the Canadian bush ‘peopled’ with golden eagles, foxes, bears and wolverine, not to mention fabulous mountains, rivers and forests of light. We have much to learn. Thanks for the blog.
Vishen, thank you for sharing this, I really felt the depth of reflection in it.
There’s a lot in what you’ve written, but what stayed with me most is the movement away from the idea of any one person holding the truth. From an MBT (My Big TOE) perspective, that really resonates, because truth isn’t something external to follow, it’s something we come to realise through our own experience and through our interactions with others.
The San example is powerful in that sense. Not so much as something to compare or idealise, but as a mirror. It reflects a way of being where ego is naturally softened, connection is central, and the system supports the growth of the whole rather than the elevation of the individual. That feels much closer to what actually helps consciousness evolve.
It also makes the idea of “progress” feel worth questioning. We’ve become incredibly advanced outwardly, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to a deeper quality of being. From where I stand, it’s the quality of consciousness that matters most, and any system that supports that across everyone is the one that truly works.
I really appreciate your shift away from the guru model as well. Creating space for multiple perspectives feels far more aligned with how truth unfolds in reality, not from a single voice, but through shared exploration.
And I’d also say, it genuinely feels good to be part of a course with a company whose direction and ethics seem to be moving in alignment with that kind of truth.
It also made me think of a close friend of mine, Steven, who is visually impaired and has written about very similar ideas around consciousness and connection. It’s reassuring to see these perspectives arising independently, it makes them feel more universal than individual.
I agree with your sense of where things are heading, not backwards, but inward, and toward each other.
Thank you again for sharing this, it really landed.
What a beautiful experience! We have so much to learn from the tribes who share unity consciousness. My personal research has identified that these tribes’ DNA has 42+2 chromosomes (42 autosomes + 2 sex chromosomes), which was very harmonious with nature and the whole of the people. Our current state (44+2) is disharmonious. We evolved intellectually, but lost our sense of harmony. The new evolution, is 46+2 (sounds familiar if you’re a Tool fan :), where we shift back to harmonious unity, with the intellectual benefits of our previous form. It doesn’t take much effort to identify people who have made this shift. it’s beautiful! Cheers to you for spreading the stories of these incredible cultures.
It’s fascinating what you write and at the same time, it shows something we already carry within us, but often try to replace with something external.
With the ego, it sometimes feels like we’re running away from the core of being human or even more, from the core of simply being a living being.
I’m 18 and moved out two months ago. I now live in a student residence. And I’ve noticed that maybe it’s not so much about what we have, but about the space we give ourselves.
Since living here, I’ve felt a deep sense of calm, respect, and understanding — both for myself and for others. Growing in a way I didn’t expect.
It’s like I could never fully breathe before. And now I can.
My life isn’t bigger or more spectacular than before. But it feels more stable, more peaceful — like being in a state where it’s not about performing or achieving what others expect from me, but about slowly discovering what it really means to live.
Warm regards from Germany
I believe it is urgent that more and more people commit to sharing these ideas and transforming them into a way of life that is in tune with the reality of humanity—especially with the imminent arrival of AI and robotics, which will reshape reality as we know it—so that we can integrate this technology in a way that balances individual and collective mental health with sustainable peace among nations. I hope to soon be able to do my part in that direction, just as you are doing.
This may be your best post so far. It made me optimistic about the future. Thanks for sharing!!
What you found was God’s civilization, on how we should live.
Hi Vishen,
Thank you for this post. It really touched me deeply and I believe it is very important topic.. It highlights one of the biggest unsolved issues of our modern time. The EGO and it´s effect on society. That is why inner work is so important, to balance, heal and integrate the shadow self, resolve your childhood traumas, balance your female/male qualities and so on..I have been going through a mayor transformation myself and the stronghold the EGO has on body/mind is amazingly frightening sometimes after many years of social conditioning & programming from early age (learning the opposite of San Culture), so I think they have a great mindset and approach to life. Thanks again for this & for being there through our evolving.
What I kept coming back to here is the possibility that we have mistaken complexity for advancement.
A society can become more intelligent at building systems and less intelligent at protecting the conditions that make life feel human.
That may be the harder question beneath all of this: not whether we progressed, but what we normalized losing on the way.
This might be the blog post I refer to most often for the rest of the year. Thanks for writing it!
I thank you for sharing your experince about San.
It highlighted the most important things we should concentrate on/consider in our life.
The whole world goes into an absulately false direction, that is for sure.
The question is how we can/could change it.
Most probably every individual would start it in his or her life. That makes it so difficult.
We can not wait for miracles without changing ourselves.
I thank you for reminding me for that.
Judit Kosa
Hi Vishen!
Great email.
It is also why the Tibetans come to my mind. They are proud of not developing their culture and land. The average person is transfixed in attaining God every moment of the day, spinning prayer beads as they walk about their day. To them, god realization is the sole purpose of life.
Hello Vishen, I love your newsletter. You always stir my heart in many ways with your deep, loving, community minded posts. I always feel refreshed, or you get me thinking and my perceptions change a tad bit.
In any case, I am always excited to read the next one.
Thanks for choosing community over being The King!
Nice post. Wisdom over Ego. I AM BECAUSE WE ARE is such a nice way to put it. Keep up the good work! 😊
Wow. What an experience. Thank you for capturing and unfolding this beauty for us readers. This is what i would call ‘enlightened society’. Brutally pure and elegant. I love it.
I lived in Japan for over 13 years and grew up with a family from Hong Kong as my second family. The cultural values of family and community over individuality are permeant in Asian cultures. There are times when as a Westerner and someone who values individuality that egalitarianism could feel almost oppressive; however, there is not this trampling on others for personal gain as much as a I see in the United States where I grew up. The globalization of the planet and the advancements in technology and AI are forcing us to face ourselves, and it’s creating a paradigm shift that is not altogether easy, but it’s necessary for our species to survive and ultimately thrive.
Beautiful! Thank you, Vishen!
You’re asking yourself whether the world needs “Less ego. More community. More women in positions of power. More leaders who foster connection rather than division?” YES is definitely the answer to all of that!
The problem I see with “universal basic income shifting from theory to inevitability” right now, is that it’s not being proposed by us, by humanity as a whole, but rather imposed on us by a small group of dangerously ego-driven, soulless individuals, who have their own power, and not humanity’s well-being, in mind.
A future where “humanity isn’t glorifying certain individuals, but living in equality” will come one day, but I don’t think it’s the one they’re trying to design right now, where governments & friends decide that everyone else needs to be equal in their disempowerment.
The day when most humans will have restored the lost connection to their own souls, and recognised and embraced their limitless power, is the day they won’t feel the need to use it over anyone else anymore; it’s the day they will understand oneness and ubuntu, and the day they won’t settle for anything less than true equality anymore.