Do you feel like everything you’ve

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
been told about freedom, love and
happiness has been a lie? Society
seeks to reinforce itself, so when it
tells us what we should work towards,
it’s in society’s interests, not our own.
And, though we’d like to take the time
to discover who we are and what we
want, it seems like we’re running
from one personal crisis to another.
We’re slaves of society and our own
physical, mental and emotional
needs, so we never have the freedom
to discover true love or happiness.
It takes thorough personal development to gain the power to
free ourselves from the chaos of our lives. But without knowing
exactly what’s included in this development, we’re left exerting
effort without knowing our destination. This book outlines
human development and the means to attain it, as well as
redefining freedom, love and happiness, so you can seek those
as well.
About the Author

Patrick is a psychological philosopher

with Master’s degrees in International
Development and Political Theory.
He’s lived and travelled across every
PATRICK WHELAN

continent on the globe in his search

for life-altering experiences and a
greater understanding of the human
condition.
 Human Development
A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness

By Patrick Whelan

Copyright © 2021 Patrick Whelan

All rights reserved

ISBN (6”x9” Print): 9798698295730

Print ASIN: B08L4FL9HS

eBook ASIN: B08KYJHQ92

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written
permission of the publisher.

Cover design by: Patrick Whelan

Cover edited by: Meng Yuxin

 CONTENTS

PART I: Human Development

Breaking the Ice 1

Lesson I: Human Development: The Framework 21

Lesson II: Physiological Needs 34

Lesson III: Safety Needs 44

Lesson IV: Social Needs 53

Lesson V: Esteem Needs 72

Lesson VI: Self-Actualisation and Purpose 87

PART II: Freedom, Love and Happiness

Lesson VII: Re-Education 101
Lesson VIII: Freedom 106
Lesson IX: Love 122
Lesson X: Happiness 143
Conclusion 163
For you, as much as for myself
 PART I
HUMAN
DEVELOPMENT
 Breaking the Ice

Life is a gift, a carnival, a playground, a grand adventure,

a journey, a banquet—enjoy it, live it, explore it, and eat
it up.
Have these kinds of sayings and the people who say
them ever irritated you? Have you ever thought, That’s
all well and good for you, but I’ve got bills, commitments,
obligations, and insecurities. I don’t have the money, time,
or courage to ‘live life to the fullest’?
If you had the chance to repeat your life over again—not
to have another chance at life but to actually repeat it,
every action, every thought, every emotion, relived, and
not once but an infinite number of times—would you
take it? Would you enjoy it? Like a stone in your shoe,
would anything stick out that causes you unwanted or
unnecessary pain in every reliving? If others could watch
your life, would they enjoy it? Would they want to live it?

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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
Friedrich Nietzsche calls this reliving the eternal
recurrence. While there are many interpretations of it,
I consider it a tool to evaluate and come to terms with
your life, as well as to chart a course for your future. If
you are happy with who you are now, then you should
be able to look back on everything that has happened to
you as fortunate, no matter how terrifying or unhappy
it was at the time; and everything you did to be right,
no matter how wrong it seemed at the time. This is what
allowed Nietzsche to coin the phrase, “what does not kill
me makes me stronger” (Twilight of the Idols (1888)).
It allows you to learn about cause and effect and to re-
evaluate right and wrong, good vs evil, and morality.
This also allows you to move forward while considering
how your actions will contribute to making you who you
further want to become.
The whole notion of identity, of ‘who we are’ is ill-
informed. We are change. If we wanted to say who we
are in this moment, we could only list age, physical
properties, and immediate motivations. But this is only
who we are to strangers. I like to think of identity as a
vector, an orientation, with a starting point, a direction,
and with actions and experiences as data along the way.
If you’re a stranger and I tell you about my day, you’ll
learn a tiny bit about who I am, and you’d likely get me
completely wrong. However, if I told you my life story as
well as my goals, you’d actually come close to knowing
who I am, my vector, and my orientation.
Our vector is constantly changing—it’s sort of a ‘line of
best fit’. When we only have a few data points, every new
experience changes our vector considerably, but as we
gain more experience, a solid direction becomes visible.
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 Breaking the Ice
Although it seems like life is happening to us and that
our vectors are chosen for us, we can still gain the power
to make things happen in our lives, thus changing our
vectors and who we are.
Figure 1: Personal Vectors

Don’t worry, this is the last semblance of anything

mathematical you’ll see in this book. In these graphs,
the same five data points, or experiences, in the first
graph, are also in the other two graphs. Also, the same
ten experiences in the second graph are in the third. So,
in the first graph, the line of best fit represents an early
estimation of who somebody is, based on an observation
of just five experiences. However, as you can see, with
additional experiences, the line of best fit, and our
estimation of who somebody is, can change drastically.
This also means that our future decisions and experiences
can change our vectors, and who we are.
Academic psychology treats us like simple machines,
with sensory inputs and neurochemical outputs, but we
are not machines, we are vectors—we are stories.
• Our settings are the locations and times we live in
and our cultures, religions, political and economic
climates, and social circles.
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
• Our plots are the sequences of events that have led
us to where we are now, with our most significant
experiences highlighted in our memories.
• Our characteristics are our preferences, our
attributes, our ambitions, our virtues, and how they
have changed over time.
• Our conflicts are all the struggles that we’ve endured,
overcome, or currently face.
• Our themes are our purpose.
• Our points of view are our limited, but ever-
expanding, perspectives from which to view the
unfolding of our lives.
• Our tones are our dispositions with which we face
our lives, whether gloomy, absurd, hopeful, joyful, or
otherwise.
• Of course, our style is, well, our style, our way of
living that sets us apart from others, and our flair or
lack thereof.
Discovery of Freedom
My story started simple enough. I grew up as a dutiful boy
in a small seaside town of about 700 in Newfoundland,
Canada. My family had some land inland, so we spent
much of our time either working on the farm or in the
forest, cutting, carrying, and storing wood to burn as
fuel, which I hated at the time, yet did my chores with
few complaints.
Because there’s very little diversity in small towns in
small provinces, as the top student in my grade, my future
4
 Breaking the Ice
prospects were to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, as if
intelligent people wouldn’t dare do anything else. Since I
didn’t like the idea of handling naked old people all day,
and Canadian lawyering sounded boring beyond belief, I
was left with the prospect of being an engineer.
With all of that decided, my life was clearly laid out, a
story signed and sealed by society. I would go to the local
university to study engineering, likely meet the love of
my life either in class or through a drunken hookup,
graduate, get a big job, get married, buy or build a house,
buy two cars and a snowmobile, have 2.5 children and a
dog, holiday in the Caribbean twice per year, remodel my
kitchen or bathroom every few years, save for retirement
so I could spend the winters in Florida, and then die. At
my funeral, people would get together to say that I was a
good man and rehash my tried and true story, all while
eating tuna sandwiches cut into triangles.
I saw this story when I was 16, and having pre-read it, I
had already experienced it. Living it over again was of no
interest to me. But, being from a small town when the
Internet was still in its infancy, I had no knowledge of the
world and its opportunities, leaving me stuck and going
through the motions.
When I was 19, however, my grandfather died, and at his
funeral, they didn’t simply say he was a good man and tell
a few funny anecdotes. People travelled from around the
world to pay their respects. Stories were told of his World
War II experiences and his subsequent global exploits
and adventures, his genius inventions, and his political
impact on the region and the lives of everybody present.
He had grown up in the same small town that I did with
even fewer opportunities, but he didn’t simply exist until
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
his death, he lived a story worth telling stories about—a
life of challenges and overcoming them, a life of passion
and purpose, and a life worth living.
This experience changed my life and ignited a fire in me
that had long gone cold. However, while I now longed for
a life worth telling stories about, I was still the dutiful boy
from a small town lacking awareness and opportunities.
While I continued with my plan to study engineering,
the most alternative and adventurous thing I could
think of was to do it in the military. I joined the military
officer training program as an engineer. Though through
successive changes of heart and majors, I eventually
settled on a business degree because it seemed general
enough to provide options, and I changed my military
trade to pilot because it sounded exciting.
Now I had a job where my military and pilot training were
thrilling and adventurous, and I grew into a dutiful man
admired by family members, friends, and strangers who
all looked at me with pride. I was a future Maverick (Top
Gun), breaking all the rules at 7 Gs. My colleagues felt
we had the coolest jobs and lives imaginable. All around
me were words of approval and encouragement. Society
approved, nay, rejoiced.
Eager to dive into my new, adventurous career, I took
every opportunity to see the different operations of the
Air Force across the country. However, after working
on many squadrons and observing the lives and jobs
of the pilots, I saw the reality: piloting is challenging,
demanding, and involves huge responsibilities, but it is
primarily a job of operating a machine. Of course, this
is not to imply that operating a machine isn’t valuable
6
 Breaking the Ice
and worthwhile work, but while I wasn’t aware of it at the
time, I’ve always been a psychological philosopher, and
there was no resonance between me and the role of pilot
or any military position for that matter.
In my further observance of military life, I saw that I
had traded in one story for another. Airbases need open
airspace, so I was destined to live in small towns in the
middle of nowhere for the rest of my career. My friends
would likely only be my colleagues. Living in relative
isolation in a life that didn’t resonate with me would
likely cause me to seek distractions and releases at every
opportunity. I’d get married, but then we’d likely cheat
on each other while I was out of town on long postings.
I’d continue this until I had two or three ex-wives and
children with different mothers. Alimony payments,
alcoholism, and bitterness would likely ensue.
Foreshadowing aside, I was still a dutiful man, so like it or
not, I was going to continue with the commitments I had
made. But they wore on me. Military pilots’ training is
one of the more mentally and physically taxing activities
in the world, requiring motivation to endure and to excel,
but that kind of motivation eluded me.
It wasn’t until my impending life and the intensity of
my tasks plunged me into a severe depression that I was
forced to re-examine who I was and what I was doing.
While my life appeared admirable, adventurous, and
worth telling stories about, I couldn’t find the energy to
continue. I didn’t see any pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow because the rainbow ended at the top of a sheer,
ice- covered mountain, inhabited by wolves, with lasers
attached to their heads.

7
Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
As I had been a dutiful person my entire life, it was not
an easy decision to let everybody else down by giving
up what they considered to be a dream job and life. It
took more than a year in these depths before I allowed
myself to admit that I couldn’t continue. One day, I
realised how dutiful I was, that I seemed to be living my
life for everybody except myself. With this realisation, it
also struck me that the only person present in my life,
every second of every day, from beginning to end was
me, so I shouldn’t be living for anybody but myself. I can’t
accurately portray how this realisation felt. My whole
world had shifted to the point of nearly knocking me over,
as if my brain actually rotated inside my skull. At that
moment, I saw everything from a different perspective.
Fearing my father’s disapproval, one of the hardest things
to do was telling him I was leaving the military. Of course,
he disapproved, but the relief I felt at that moment
was indescribable. After walking around my whole life
encased in a thick, heavy shell, I shattered it—I was free!
I began to look at life’s endless possibilities.
I stepped out of my story, and my distant future
disappeared on to blank pages. I was no longer a 16-year-
old ignorant boy. Now, I was a 27-year-old man with a
university degree, empowered with military training,
and with experiences, adventures, and stories already
attached to me. My future was now mine to re-create.
This is only a fraction of my story of personal development,
and making the decision to leave the military didn’t result
in the complete attainment of freedom. In this book, I
started with this particular story, however, because I’m
sure everyone can relate to some aspect of it.

8
 Breaking the Ice
• Maybe you’ve also felt limited in your life’s options,
as if your city, family, and culture decide your future.
• Maybe you’re also afraid of disappointing your family
and friends.
• Maybe you feel boxed in by the choices you’ve made
in the past.
• Maybe you’re afraid of change.
• Maybe you, too, find the scripted story of society
pointless.
• Maybe you find there’s nothing worthwhile motivating
you to exert any more energy than you are exerting
now.
• Maybe you’re a nihilist, and you think life is
meaningless and ask, why bother?
If any of these apply to you, you could use a rewrite.
Love by Any Other Name is Not as Sweet
There’s more to life, however, than simply taking control
of it. As you recall, at 16 my story was already written,
including meeting a woman during university, which
would lead to marriage, 2.5 children, beach holidays,
home renovations, and side by side burial plots. The plan
was to find somebody I liked and then we’d spend our
lives together—easy, right?
Well, I met such a person in my last year of university, and
she was the woman of my and everybody else’s dreams. She
was intelligent, fit, sexy, beautiful, motivated, fun, funny,
popular, humble, played the guitar, had the voice of an
angel, and she loved me! A real unicorn. Everybody was
jealous of me, and I felt we had the perfect relationship.
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
But remember that at that time, I had left society’s story
and had adopted the military story of pending alimony
and alcoholism. After a year together, military life created
a situation where it was easy for her to break up with
me, and she did. I was devastated for a long time. I kept
saying to myself (and to her) that I loved her so much.
How could she do this to me? I longed so much to be
back with her, to have her attention, to have her affection,
to have her love, and to have her approval. I was a damn
good boyfriend... wasn’t I? I treated her like a queen...
didn’t I?
Maybe you can see the truth already, whereas it took me
a while to realise it; I didn’t love her. What I did love was
having her around and how she made me feel and that
she desired me. I was possessive and jealous, and while
our chemistry was great, I was actually very selfish in our
relationship. After the breakup, the pain that I was feeling
was due to my shattered ego and having to adapt to a new
reality against my wishes. None of this was written in
society’s story for me. I realised that I felt very strongly
about our relationship, but anything that destructive
couldn’t possibly be love. With this realisation, all the
pain and the hurt went away, replaced with acceptance.
Now, I know everyone can relate to aspects of my story of...
• Confusing the desire to possess with love.
• Confusing jealousy with love.
• Mourning lost relationships.
• Trying to fix failed relationships.

10
 Breaking the Ice
The meaning of love has been twisted by artists for so long
that it has lost its original meaning. Love is supposed to
be the strongest, most positive human force, but now it’s
relegated to our most egoistic, destructive desires. ‘Love’
has become synonymous with ‘want’ and ‘really like’.
I have actually been philosophising about love since
I was six years old, when I thought I was in love with
my first-grade school teacher, Ms Santi. So, I thought I
understood love quite well until that breakup happened.
It was then that I understood that the world and I were
completely wrong about love and that a re-education
was necessary. So, if you feel you might be ready for a re-
education about love, let’s rewrite that story.
Happy Trails
But why do we still want love? Why do we still want
freedom? When I was 16, mapping out the future for
the world and myself, from my limited perspective, I
changed my horny-teenager view that all motivation was
directed at finding love to all motivation was directed
at finding happiness, and love was one of the means to
this end. However, I saw that nobody actually knew what
happiness was. Instead, everyone seemed to be taking a
very roundabout way to get to an unknown destination.
So, it was at this time that I started my investigations into
what happiness was so I, and perhaps others, could take
a direct route to it.
I followed that rabbit down so many holes that I couldn’t
dare count them. If you look to the literature, there’s
extensive disagreement and disillusion on the subject.
Some great thinkers even gave up on happiness, saying it’s
unimportant or irrelevant, and possibly even disastrous.
11
Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
This is how elusive happiness is. At the same time I
realised I was living my life for everybody but myself, I
also realised I was never a happy person.
I never had the typical rebellious teenager phase. At the
time, I assumed it was because I was a good, smart kid,
but looking back I see it was something else entirely. I was
so angry and unhappy most of my life, and had gotten so
used to containing it, that it became the norm and there
was no change when I reached adolescence. Because this
negativity was the norm, I didn’t even notice it. When
your baseline is anger, provocation leads directly to rage.
As I was bigger and stronger than most of my peers,
people rarely offended me, but when they did, I boiled
over immediately.
Joy was so rare that when anybody saw it in me, they felt
the need to comment on it. I still remember a classmate
seeing me smile, and being so shocked by it, she
commented that for a moment I looked like an innocent
child in his glee. I was always being told to smile, but that
only made me angrier. Happiness was elusive for me.
With my ex-girlfriend, however, my first memory with
her is smiling so much that my face hurt. Even when I
told her a year later that people always said I didn’t smile
enough, she couldn’t believe it, because we were smiling
together all the time. However, my new joy didn’t mean
that I was a happy person, as that quickly disappeared
when we broke up. I was dependent on our relationship
for my apparent happiness. However, the changes in the
norm from angry to joyful to depressed is what allowed
me to realise that I had not been happy before, and that
I wanted to understand what happiness was. I needed to
rewrite my story.
12
 Breaking the Ice
The Odyssey
In my search for answers about freedom, love, and
happiness, I first dove into psychology. The first thing
I learned is that the way we talk to ourselves matters. I
had always told myself I should do this, and should not
do that, but using the word should makes something an
obligation, a chore. We generally don’t like to do chores
and put them off until later. Furthermore, should creates
rules and boundaries, decreasing our freedom.
This is an easy fix. We can simply change the way we
speak to ourselves, by replacing should with want. But,
not only do we change the words, but the way we think
about the action. If you make a mental note to catch
yourself every time you say should, must, ought to, have
to, or need to, you can realise that you’re placing undue
pressure on yourself, stop, and think of a way to rephrase
the statement and your intent. For example, I should eat
healthy and lose weight. This statement makes taking
care of my health an obligation and a chore and I’ll likely
only do it if I feel I really need to. If I catch myself, and
rephrase it as something like, I want to eat healthy and
lose weight because it’ll make me feel better, as well as look
more attractive, increasing my romantic opportunities
and self-esteem, I’ve turned the chore into a desire with
incentives, which will also affect the effort I put into my
new lifestyle. It’s important that the new statement is
honest, too, if we want it to affect us. And, if we can’t find
a reason to say we want to do something, why do it at all?
Psychology also led me to Erich Fromm’s Escape from
Freedom (1941) which allowed me to see that a large
aspect of freedom is knowing where and how we aren’t
free. So much of the way we think and act is inherited
13
Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
from society. Americans and the Scottish both speak
English, but they speak it very differently. This is because
the people in each society inherit their speech, their
accent, and their mannerisms from their respective
societies. Language is just one obvious example of how
society molds and shapes how we think and act, but there
are many others. It takes courage to accept that we’re
followers, and then even more courage to choose a path
of freedom.
Choosing freedom allowed me to search for answers in
experience. I came to understand a lot about love, human
motivation, and the way people think and feel through
dating. I travelled and dated many different women from
all over the world, from every major religion, language,
and culture. The mutual vulnerability and closeness that
can come from dating gave me an inside view into many
different ways of thinking and feeling. The diversity of
experiences allowed me to see the common threads. It
can be difficult trying to find how a Canadian is different
from a Peruvian, an Egyptian, a Russian, an Indian, and
a Chinese person, and even more difficult to find how
we’re the same.
With my diverse set of experiences and a budding personal
philosophy, I then dove into academia to see what else
there was to learn. However, my forays into international
development, political theory, and philosophy didn’t
go so well because I saw gaping holes in most of what I
read. These fields largely neglect psychology, while new
psychology neglects our stories. Logical theories didn’t
include the logic of humanity and thus couldn’t function
in a human world.

14
 Breaking the Ice
It wasn’t until I realised for myself that morality as we’re
taught it didn’t exist that I started reading Nietzsche to
see what he had to say about it. While I don’t agree with
everything Nietzsche says, I have never read anybody
else, in any field, who understood the human condition
as well as he did. It’s rare to see anybody effectively
combining psychology with philosophy.
This book is a human project, and I wouldn’t write it if
it wasn’t. It applies to everybody, whether male, female,
or other; young or old; Western, Eastern, North, South;
rich or poor; educated or experienced; religious, atheist,
agnostic, or ignorant. No matter if your goal is love,
wealth and fame, raising a family, political power, quiet
happiness, or anything else you might have reason to
want, this book will prepare you for it.
The Approach
It was only after I made considerable advances in my
personal development that I could see that I wasn’t happy
or free and didn’t know what love was. Development
grants us the awareness, power and freedom from self-
absorption to allow us the freedom to expand other
freedoms, choose love, and attain happiness. But what is
development and how do we do it? How do we gain the
power to rewrite our story?
Current theories of development are either incomplete, or
they describe stages of development without explaining
how we progress. So, the first part of this book will focus
on outlining my theory for actionable development.
I developed this framework by comparing my own
observations and philosophy with those of others across
multiple disciplines. When analysing a theory, the first
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
question I ask is, ‘Does it apply to me?’ If not, then it
doesn’t apply to everybody, so I know it doesn’t work.
Second, I ask if elements of those theories apply to me.
If so, then how do I incorporate them into a larger,
coherent philosophy? When I can be sure that I’ve found
theories that at least apply to me, I then have to apply
them to everyone else to see if there are outliers— people
to whom the theories don’t apply.
Of course, for such an endeavour, I need a large, diverse
sample, which my global experiences have given me.
Finally, my theory has to have a logical base. If I tell you
that the key to happiness is puppies, chocolate, and rom-
coms, I’ve created a random list without a logical base.
Somebody, through observation, might say it worked for
them, but there’s no basis for saying why it works or how
it will work for everybody. Unfortunately, many amateurs
and professional philosophers have illogical theories.
Academically, I came across several theories that, while
not complete or completely coherent, were at least on the
right track. While I may not be using these theories as
originally intended, it matters not. All that matters is my
theory works, it makes sense, it’s easy to understand, and
it applies to everybody. Furthermore, I’m not choosing
theories from just anyone, as my contributors are some
of the greats: Abraham Maslow, Amartya Sen, Anthony
Giddens, and Friedrich Nietzsche. If their theories are no
longer in use today, it’s most likely because they’re not
properly understood. My development framework will
largely be an amalgamation of their works, glued together
with my own interpretations and additions.
Once we understand human development, we’ll be ready
for a re-education in freedom, love, and happiness.
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 Breaking the Ice
Without freedom, we can’t move towards our goals.
Without love, life loses meaning and we contribute to
the destruction of the world, rather than it’s saving. And,
if none of this brings happiness, why bother? People say
that life is suffering, but it doesn’t have to be. However,
the terms freedom, love, and happiness have been
thrown around so often in so many contexts that it’s clear
the concepts are being misunderstood. How can you
search for something if you don’t know what it is? So,
we’ll return to ancient sources of knowledge before the
artists and marketers had their way with the language to
see where we’ve gone wrong.
Putting Power Back in its Place
Power is necessary for human development. So, before we
continue, we should make sure we’re all on the same page
in our understanding of power. Essentially, power is the
ability to assert a force and to create a desired change.
Now, this is very abstract, and its applications are vast.
Here are some examples:
• If I give a vendor money, and she then gives me a
product or service, that’s power because she wouldn’t
have otherwise given it to me.
• If I ask you to vote for me, and you weren’t going to
vote for me, but now you will, that’s power, no matter
what mechanism I used to change your mind.
• If you’re a student talking in my class and I look at
you, and you stop, that’s power.
• If I tell you to give me your wallet, and you do, that’s
power.

17
Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
• If I decide to change my lifestyle to lose weight, and I
do, that’s power.
Power is relative. If the vendor is more powerful than
I am, she can demand more money for her product or
refuse to deal with me altogether. If a student is privileged
and popular and the teacher is nervous and insecure,
this situation won’t result in silence. If little kids without
weapons demand the wallet of an adult, they’re not going
to get it. When dealing with having power over ourselves,
if our willpower is weak, and our hunger is strong, our
unconscious desires will have more power than our
conscious self, and we’ll seek food.
Power exists in relationships. No power exists between
myself and some random blacksmith in Bulgaria. We
don’t know each other or have any kind of relationship,
so there is zero power between us. However, power
does exist between me and my landlord, my bosses,
my students, my family, my friends, and my lovers. To
say that power exists does not mean that one person is
more powerful than the other or that there’s some sort of
abuse. Power exists and is asserted in both directions in a
relationship. The person who asserts the least amount of
force to create the most change has the most power. In the
classroom, my students have power over me, but it’s very
little compared to how much power I have over them. The
relationship between parents and children is similar as
well. In romantic relationships, each partner will usually
have an area of power or one will have more power over
the entire relationship. When it comes to ourselves, we’re
examining the power relationship between our conscious
desires and the feelings, emotions, and needs of our
bodies.
18
 Breaking the Ice
Power can be augmented. The child demanding the
wallet of the adult will have much more success if she
has a gun and threatens violence. The child will have an
even higher chance of success if the adult has knowledge
that the child has shot people in the past. We learn from
our mistakes and the mistakes of others, so historical
information can greatly augment power. While the threat
of violence can greatly enhance power, actual violence
is a sign of impotence because it means the person or
organisation making the demands didn’t have sufficient
power to get the desired change.
Among many other factors, logic and reason also augment
power. If a politician can convince you that it makes sense
and it benefits you to vote for her, she’ll have much more
success than simply asking you to vote for her. If I can
convince you of what development, freedom, love, and
happiness are and that they’re worthwhile to pursue,
I’ll have used logic and reason to augment my power.
Furthermore, you’ll gain logic and reason to augment
the power of your conscious self in order to achieve the
transformation you want.
Active human development is much easier when your
conscious self has more power than your unconscious
desires, emotions, and needs. Simply relying on will
power will not suffice. There are many ways to augment
our power over ourselves, and we benefit by doing all we
can to enhance this power. The knowledge in this book
will give you power, but it’s up to you to seek more.
A Warning
If you think after reading the last page of this book, you’ll
be joining the #BuddhasofInstagram as enlightened
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
beings, be prepared for disappointment. While this book
will provide you with awareness and a guide to personal
development, you will have to put in the work to rewrite
your own story. The path of personal development is long
and arduous, or at least it is when you don’t have a guide.
This book will serve as a roadmap so your wanderings will
be a little less aimless. However, when I say a roadmap,
I do not mean a singular path. Picture it more like the
roadmap of the United States, with the West Coast as the
infancy of development and the East Coast as advanced
development. Everybody’s path can or will be different,
as they start in different locations, such as Seattle or San
Francisco, and end at different locations, such as Miami
or Manhattan. Some will take direct routes to get there
quicker, and others will take the long way across, hoping
to experience as much of the country and life as possible.
Of course, I recommend and appreciate absolute
rebellion and taking different paths and moving in
different directions because then your failures will
strengthen your resolve to keep moving forward. But as
long and arduous as the path may be, with the rewards
of empowerment, freedom, love, and happiness, is there
anything else worth doing?

20
 Lesson I
Human Development: The Framework

A hard truth that must be accepted is that all humans

are self-interested, all the time. Now, I know you helped
your grandmother with the laundry last Sunday and you
volunteer once a month down at the Y, and you can’t
resist putting a quarter in the palm of every glossy-eyed
child you encounter begging on the street. Yet as altruistic
as you think you are, all of your actions are done for
your own self-interest. You will not progress in your
development as long as you hold illusions that you’re not
self-interested in everything you do. I’m making a big
deal of this because many of the people I tell this to throw
up their arms and attempt to make the case that they’re
the second coming of Christ in their altruism. They’ll
fight to the death in defence of their self-proclaimed
selflessness. Even if you suffer through something to
help another person, you’re doing it out of self-interest.
You’re not necessarily calculating or deceptive, you’re just
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
helping somebody because helping others suits you in
that moment for whatever reason, be it for pay, a favour,
respect, to strengthen a relationship, personal growth,
appreciation, or even a sense of purpose. Many people
join protests because of the unity, the togetherness, the
feeling of belonging, and the sense of purpose. Everything
you do is self-interested. If you can’t get past that, should
you continue reading? Probably not, but maybe so...
In my opening story, I said I realised I was living my life
for everybody but myself, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t
self- interested. I was letting everybody else choose the
direction of my life because I didn’t have the knowledge,
resources, or courage to choose my own path. Living for
others is easy. Working hard and excelling at things that
others like makes you feel good about yourself. I was
living a life I didn’t want, but the respect and admiration
I was getting was improving my self-esteem, and that was
more important, until it wasn’t. And I know this only
from reflection—I wasn’t consciously trading away my
enjoyment of life for self-esteem—I also thought I was
selfless.
So, if everything we do is self-interested, what are our
interests? Do we have the same interests? Looking
around the world, there seems to be an infinitude of
interests. What does your Wall Street banker, feminist
women’s rights lawyer, transgender teenager, bohemian
beta male, and alpha male gym rat have in common?
Almost everything. While it may seem like they’re all
motivated towards completely different things, that’s just
expression—the surface of their motivation—and that
can vary to infinity. But underneath all that, we’re driven
by the same things. We all want the same things.
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 The Framework
Maslow’s Motivation
Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper, A Theory of
Motivation, asserts that people are motivated to fulfill
their needs, which come in five categories:
• Physiological
• Safety
• Belonging
• Esteem
• Self-actualisation
Maslow understood that we don’t all have the same needs
or satisfy them in the same way, though he asserted that we
do have the same categories of needs that are fundamental
to the human experience. Now, there is debate over the
categories of needs, with some people proposing different,
more, or fewer categories, or no categories at all, but
removing categories increases vagueness, while I want an
actual actionable story that is also easy to understand. For
this, categories help. The main thing is that everything
we do is to satisfy our needs, and we need a framework
to help us understand our needs because they can either
be subtle or very strong and misunderstood. Either way,
every action you take— from scratching your nose, to
impulsively buying $50k worth of stocks in coconuts, to
burning your bra on the steps of Parliament, to defying
traditional washroom etiquette, to inviting your friends
over to watch a Woody Allen flick, to wearing a Speedo
while deadlifting 250kg—is to satisfy a need or multiple
needs from these categories.

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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
Nietzsche’s Master Drive
You’re probably asking, But if all we are doing is satisfying
our needs, where’s our choice? How can we try to change?
How can we possibly be the agent of our own development?
These questions were already answered by Nietzsche
in his 1886 book, Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche
asserts that we cannot know any other reality beyond
the reality of our drives, but that our drives are always
competing for center stage. Drives and needs are two
sides of the same coin. While a need draws your attention
to something you are lacking, the drive pushes you to
satisfy that deprivation. Since recognising a deprivation
pushes us to satisfy it, the words need and drive are nearly
interchangeable. So, Nietzsche’s drives are the same as
Maslow’s needs, and while Nietzsche gives examples,
such as hunger and the sex drive, he refrains from creating
a framework and agrees that not everybody has the same
drives in the same strengths.
The important point is that at any given moment, we
have many needs begging for our attention, and through
conscious decisions and unconscious influences, we do
something that will satisfy one or more of those needs.
For example, if you’re lonely and horny, maybe you’ll
start swiping through your favourite dating app, but if
you’re hungry and horny, maybe you’ll eat a huge meal so
all your blood goes to your digestive system thus reducing
your sexual desire.
Nietzsche considered the competition of these drives as
chaotic; in other words, we’re constantly being pulled in
different directions by whichever drive can command us
the loudest. If you’re weak, there’s no such thing as free
will, just the will of your drives. One of the drives is your
24
 The Framework
conscious drive, your ‘will to power’ that is essentially
your free will. For example, if you consciously want to eat
healthy, but when given the option between a burger and
a salad, you choose the burger, it means another drive
overpowered your conscious drive and reduced your
free will. Development, then, is the mastery of all other
drives under the will to power. Remember, there is no
reality outside of our drives, so it is not ‘us’ mastering
our drives—some detached self—but another drive
(conscious drive, our need to be in control) that attempts
to master the other drives.
Under this model, it’s not that the other drives disappear
or are muted, just that their satisfaction must also satisfy
the master drive, which is the drive or need that directs
the way we satisfy all of our other needs. Some people,
for example, allow their hunger to be their master drive,
meaning that they satisfy all of their needs through food.
Soon, eating becomes the primary way to turn off those
signals that you’re lonely, horny, bored, nervous, stressed,
sleepy, etc. When the will to power, or your conscious
drive, is your master drive, it means you satisfy all of your
drives in a way that aligns with your conscious desire to
be who you want to be.
For example, if you consciously desire to lose weight, you
will ensure that the satisfaction of all your other needs
support your goal of losing weight. You’ll satisfy your
hunger with healthy food; maybe you’ll satisfy your social
needs with fitness groups and workout partners; your
esteem will be improved by your progress; and you’d be
satisfying a purpose of healthy living.

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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
As another example, the devout monk will satisfy his
hunger according to the doctrine of his religion. He will
sublimate his sexual energies and find friendship and
intimacy in brotherhood, self-esteem in the strength of
his conviction, and purpose in his religion. He wants to
be a devout monk so strongly that he still satisfies all of
his needs, but does so in a way that supports his will to
power instead of drawing attention from it.
Giddens’ Ontological Security
Now, a difference between humans and other animals is
that we humans have an advanced concept of time in which
we see patterns and trends and can make predictions for
the future. This can either give us confidence or anxiety
and allows for us to plan or to have a little more freedom
to fly blind. We do not only process the signals of the
immediate needs of the body but also predict future
needs based on past occurrences.
Anthony Giddens, in his 1991 book, Modernity and
Self-Identity, coined the term ontological security and
asserted that all people seek a sense of order throughout
their experiences. Essentially, we seek security through a
pleasant, predictable life in all respects. So, we are driven
to rectify insecurities. For example, we don’t only want
to satisfy our hunger now, but we want to be sure we’ll
have meals in the future as well, and we feel insecure if we
can’t be sure of our future hunger satisfaction.
I don’t agree that all people are seeking ontological
security at all times because when we reach that security,
we feel safe enough to explore and reintroduce chaos
into our lives. Once the chaos is no longer interesting
and has become unbearable, we then seek ontological
26
 The Framework
security again, and the cycle continues. While this idea
helps us to complete a theory of motivation, it also allows
us to say that everything we do is to satisfy our needs
and to ensure the satisfaction of our future needs. Our
insecurities about the future become immediate needs
or drives that must be addressed. At any given moment,
our current needs and insecurities over the satisfaction of
future needs are competing for attention and our actions
are the result of that competition and our will.
Sen’s Capability Approach
Our theory of development is still too vague, however,
because the mastery of drives or needs can be interpreted
in many ways. If you become an expert fisherman and
seafood chef, have you mastered your insecurity about
food forever? What if a moratorium is announced and
fishing isn’t allowed? What if there’s an environmental
disaster preventing the fisherman from fishing? If you
get married, does that mean you’ve taken care of all your
sexual, social, and intimacy needs for the rest of your
life? What if your spouse leaves you? We still need more
pieces to complete the puzzle.
Nobel Prize winner Amartya Kumar Sen was one of the
first people to say that international development should
focus on human development, and specifically the
increasing of freedoms. In his 1999 book, Development
as Freedom, he created the capability approach. He
says if we’re given freedoms to do a wider variety of
things, which he calls functionings, we’ll develop more
capabilities, which will translate into more freedoms
that we have reasons to enjoy. Now, he said a lot of other
things, but this is the genius— the diamond in the rough.
I say in the rough because this is the complete theory left
27
Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
vague and unfinished. However, this is all we need as we
already have the rest.
Now, ever since the book came out, people have been
trying to complete the theory. Sen believes the theory
should be left vague so that nations can democratically
choose which freedoms they want to include in their
own process of development. The economic community,
however, felt that specific lists of freedoms, capabilities,
and functionings should be made. Now, I certainly
haven’t seen all the lists that have been attempted, but the
sheer randomness of these attempts made me give up in
disgust. I won’t name any names, but some of the biggest
names in the field, representing the finest institutions
in the world, had such things as being able to go to the
cinema and being able to form relationships with animals
on their lists. Don’t get me wrong, while I enjoy a good
trip to the cinema and having a cat or dog (or both!) sit
in my lap, they’re not crucial to human development and
freedom.
Even when Sen gave examples of some freedoms
necessary for human development, some of them seemed
random. If we’re left to simply think up lists of freedoms
we should have without any logical basis, these lists can
go to infinity. How could we not include the freedom to
go to the cinema? A list that goes to infinity, however,
isn’t helpful because it doesn’t tell us priorities or where
to start. We can’t go to the government with a list of a
million freedoms that they need to give us. This is not
actionable, so nothing will happen. So, this dilemma is
exactly why we need a rational framework.
Returning to the capability approach, with its functionings,
capabilities, and freedoms, for now, we’ll skip Sen’s first
28
 The Framework
freedom in his theory and go straight to the functionings,
which are the actual things we do. We think, eat, learn,
have sex, talk with friends, and do other stuff. Capabilities
are what we are able to accomplish by doing these things.
Eating satisfies hunger needs; learning satisfies curiosity
and develops further capabilities; having sex satisfies
sexual and intimacy needs; and talking with friends
satisfies social needs, etc. Freedoms, in this context are
what we are freed from in that accomplishment. We are
freed from hunger; our curiosity is sated; we’re sexually
satisfied; and we’re no longer lonely, etc. So functionings
are what we do to satisfy needs. Being able to satisfy a
need represents a capability. Satisfying a need frees us
from having to expend our energies on that need so we
can spend them elsewhere. When we are free from one
desire, we are then free to do things that satisfy other
needs.
Returning to the question of the fisherman, his perfection
of the art of fishing, the fishing itself, and the eating of
fish are functionings. These functionings give him the
capability to satisfy his hunger, as well as other needs
such as esteem and possibly self-actualisation, and the
insecurity over future meals. Being freed from the drive
to satisfy these four needs, the fisherman is now free to
devote his energy towards his other needs, such as his
social needs.
In/dependence
At this point, I have to add my own element to the
framework. We have many different ways to satisfy needs.
A person in a coma in an intensive care unit is having
many of his physiological needs met without even being
awake. This is thanks to the machines, nurses, doctors,
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
hospitals, government, and insurance company who
are making this possible. In this case, the patient has
the capability to satisfy these needs, but he depends
on others for that capability, thus he has a dependent
capability. Children usually have all of their needs taken
care of by their parents, teachers, and the government, as
left to their own devices, they would be severely affected
and in constant danger, so children generally have many
dependent capabilities. In the case of the fisherman, he
satisfies many of his needs through fishing, so he depends
on fishing, and has dependent capabilities as well.
An independent capability, however, is when we have
mastered a capability and are no longer dependent on
it for satisfaction. A person who has only ever had one
friend depends on that friend for many of her social needs.
However, a person with many friends and the tools to
make new friends isn’t dependent on specific people for
satisfying her social needs and is independent. She has
power over her social life. The distinction is important
because dependence creates insecurity and a feeling of
powerlessness, while independence gives power and
freedom.
However, this does not mean that dependence is
undesirable. The insecurity of dependence is not nearly
as bad as the insecurity over unmet needs. When you have
no friends, that first friend you get will provide a major
source of relief as well as of enjoyment. Being temporarily
freed from the shackles of loneliness will give you the space
to develop yourself both socially and otherwise. Hence,
dependent capabilities can be, and often are, the steps
towards gaining independent capabilities. However, if
dependence goes on too long, it can cause insecurity and
30
 The Framework
even decadence—a reversal of development. People get
stuck in dependent relationships, distracting themselves
from the insecurity of dependence, while feeling that
their need is being satisfied, thinking no development is
necessary.
In the case of the fisherman, if he can’t fish, the satisfaction
of at least four of his needs will be in jeopardy. Recognising
his dependence will nag at him until it’s resolved, which
might be years if the fishing is going well and he doesn’t
feel there is a need to address it. How can it be addressed?
The fisherman would need to expand his functionings
to reduce his dependence. If the fisherman started
hunting and farming as well, he would be increasing his
functionings and reducing his dependence, because if
one or two of them happened to fail, he’d have a third
source of food, as well as an activity that supports his
esteem, possibly self-actualisation, and security over
future needs’ satisfaction. This is development.
A Theory of Human Development
So, now we have a complete theory of human development
as the expansion of functionings that lead to us gaining
independent capabilities to satisfy our needs and relieve us
of our insecurities, granting freedom from uncontrolled
desires, and power over one’s own life.
So, if freedom is the domain in which we are free, human
development seeks to expand our domains by giving us
freedom from the necessity to expend our energy and
resources on the satisfaction of our needs. Furthermore,
when we demand freedoms from others, they should be
the freedoms necessary to enhance our ability to develop
ourselves; anything else is superfluous, since we only act
towards or care about the satisfaction of our needs.
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
However, our needs are wide-ranging. I’m not simply
referring to food, clothing, shelter, and a toothbrush.
Our framework of needs is based on Maslow’s five
categories, all the way up to self- actualisation. All of your
needs must be fulfilled or you’ll have growing feelings
of distress until all needs are satisfied. While Maslow
presents the categories of needs as a hierarchy, with each
level needing to be satisfied before moving to the next, I
disagree, as we’re often seeking the satisfaction of many
needs at once. However, it is certainly true that some
needs are more time-sensitive than others. If you’re not
getting any oxygen, it takes priority over all else. If you’re
not self-actualised, you will have feelings of distress, but
it won’t hurt to put it off for a little while, so you can take
care of your other needs. Unfortunately, many people put
that off forever and find ways to temporarily mute that
distress. So, while freedom of speech may not necessarily
affect the satisfaction of many of our material needs, it
may greatly affect our need for self-actualisation.
So how do we satisfy all our needs and also remove any
insecurity about them? Five categories of needs, with
potentially hundreds of needs in each category, can seem
daunting, like it would be a scheduling nightmare trying
to juggle all of their satisfactions. I assure you it isn’t, as
some functionings can serve to satisfy multiple needs, as
in the example of the fisherman.
Mindfulness
I must stress that a certain level of mindfulness could
be extremely helpful as you proceed. By mindfulness,
I mean learning to listen to and understand yourself,
understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing
it. We cloak ourselves in webs of illusion to justify the
32
 The Framework
existence we wish to portray, so it can be unsettling to tear
it all down and reveal yourself for who you are. If it helps,
just remember everybody is in a stage of development—
nobody is fully developed. We are motivated to act to
attend to our needs. The most motivated and busiest
are the neediest. Any conscious desire you have can
be traced to multiple fundamental needs. Why do you
want to go to that rock concert? Why do you want the
red Lamborghini? Why do you want to be an accounts
manager? Why do you want people to follow you on social
media? The answers aren’t simple, and they can be traced
to multiple needs, but when you learn to understand the
motive behind your thoughts and actions, it sets you free
from the clutter in your head, allowing you to satisfy
your needs directly, instead of hoping that a new car will
improve your self-esteem.
Additionally, for those scrutinising my work for academic
integrity, while my framework appears to be a synthesis
of the work of Sen, Giddens, Nietzsche, and Maslow,
I’m not necessarily using their work as they intended.
I consider each of their theories to be incomplete or
slightly off, though with considerable merit. So, my
framework has similarities to their work, but does not
hold true to it. While I initially thought of discrediting
their theories, I realised it is much better to build on what
they have started than to tear everything down and start
from scratch.

33
 Lesson II
Physiological Needs

The physiological needs are the physical needs of

the body to maintain life, such as those for air, water,
nutrition, sleep, sex, mobility, etc. These needs are
acutely felt and easy to recognise. When these needs
are not satisfied, death and dysfunction are possible.
Furthermore, because of the acuity of these needs, it is
likely that when a physiological need is in distress, the
person can’t even begin to satisfy other needs until the
physiological distress is eliminated. When you’re gasping
for air, you’re not thinking about the neighbour who
insulted you. When you’re starving such that you’re
near death, you’re not thinking about Thursday night’s
bowling league. When you’re crossing a desert and dying
of thirst, you’re not trying to improve your enunciation.
All of your thoughts, feelings, memories, hopes, dreams,
and actions are geared towards the satisfaction of that
need.
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 Physiological Needs
Sleep
While the immediate satisfaction of these needs might
seem straightforward, they aren’t necessarily. Most
people don’t understand their bodies well enough to
know how to keep them in a healthy condition, meaning
that they spend much of their lives with their bodies in
distress, which prevents them from attending to other
needs. I have met many people with insomnia, and
I have had it in the past myself, yet very few people
know how to get over it. They stop drinking caffeine,
they drink warm milk, they try lavender oils, they take
melatonin, and nothing works. They’re exhausted, but
their mind won’t shut off. For myself, I had insomnia
while going through the breakup I mentioned earlier. I
wasn’t sleeping or eating, and the reason was that I had
broken thought loops running over and over again in my
head, unable to finish them because I was missing the
necessary information. Do you know that if you have a
song stuck in your head, the way to get it out is to listen
to it and pay attention to the words? Close the loop so
your brain can move on to processing something else. At
the time, I didn’t have enough information to make the
breakup make sense. My brain was attempting to process
everything, but it couldn’t because it was missing that
crucial information. Only when I realised that it didn’t
matter what all of her reasons were, that I clearly wasn’t
ready to be a positive member of a relationship because
I needed to be more overtly selfish to understand myself
and love, could I close the loop and move on. When you
have these broken thought loops, you need to recognise
them, and then seek the information you need, or if you
can’t get it, find a way to accept and move on.

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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
Fitness and Nutrition
The need for nutrition is not simply a need for calories.
The body requires proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and
vitamins and minerals in specific ranges of amounts and
proportions to perform all of its functions. If you’re not
getting enough B-vitamins, for example, there is a whole
host of things in your body that are not functioning
properly, such as your metabolism, cell growth and repair,
liver, energy production, etc. On top of that, every body
is different, so not everyone needs the same amounts or
even relative proportions. I had my DNA tested and it told
me exactly how my body processes all of these and how
much of each I needed. When you learn to understand
your body from tests but also from experimentation and
observation, you’ll find you can work with your body
rather than being in a constant struggle with it.
Most people have no idea what their individual bodily
needs are. As long as we don’t understand our body and
how to keep it healthy, we are in constant distress that is
preventing us from devoting our energies to other needs.
Experiment, do research, ask friends and family, there
is literally too much information out there about health.
Find what works for you. Many people hate the idea of
going to a gym. Well, gyms aren’t necessary. There are
tons of other ways to get and stay fit, such as running,
walking, biking, swimming, dancing, yoga, tai chi,
surfing, climbing, and many others. Find something you
like and go with that.
Many people are happy to listen to doctors, personal
trainers, and friends, but really nobody will ever
completely understand your body or have the time to
devote to getting to know your body like you do. We
36
 Physiological Needs
place the responsibility for our health on others so we
have somebody other than ourselves to blame when
something goes wrong. We also feel like something will
go wrong because we have insecurity, which, of course,
we have because we don’t have independence and power
over ourselves. We’ll never be truly physically healthy
until we develop the independent capability to manage
our health.
The Sex Drive
While some have tried to argue with me that not
everybody has a sex drive, certainly enough have one to
make it worth specifically talking about. The sex drive,
on its own, is simply a desire for sexual gratification
and can be satisfied through masturbation, if no willing
participants are available. However, as straightforward as
that may sound to some, many people don’t know how to
masturbate or at least how to gain satisfaction through it.
Again, this requires research and experimentation to get to
know your body. I know many people think masturbation
isn’t important and believe that their sexual gratification
is the duty of their partner, but learning to understand
yourself sexually will vastly improve sex with partners as
well. Every person reacts differently to different stimuli,
so it’s not possible to take what you’ve learned from one
partner and apply it directly to another; every partner
is a new mystery to be solved. That solution will come
much easier, and less clumsily, if you already know the
solution to help them with it. If your religion or beliefs
don’t allow masturbation, or you’re adamantly against it,
you can look into sublimation, in which you try to turn
your sexual energies into creative energies.

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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
The repression of sexuality can lead to many problems.
We have to master our body’s needs by working through
them, not against them. For those who want to abstain
from sexual activity, dig into sublimation and transfer that
energy somewhere else instead of repressing or fighting it.
Gain power over your life by developing the independent
capability to manage and satisfy sexual needs.
That being said, we’re often feeling multiple drives at
once, so it is likely that along with the sex drive, you’re
also feeling the need for intimacy, belonging, or self-
esteem. While I’ll talk more about those in their respective
sections, it’s important to understand that each of those
drives are still independent and can be satisfied as such,
or you can find an all-in-one solution. Many people seek
out sex when really all they want is intimacy or the self-
esteem boost from being chosen, desired, and accepted.
However, when we confuse our desires, it’s possible that
they’ll lead us into situations we really didn’t want. This is
why it’s important to understand your body and yourself
so you can satisfy all of your needs in a way that makes
you feel good about yourself as well. Again, this gives you
power over your life.
Access to Resources and Competition
Getting to know your body and how to manage it is one
of the most important functionings when it comes to
developing the independent capability to satisfy your
physiological needs. Knowing that, no matter what
happens to you, you’ll know how to deal with it, removes
a lot of insecurity. However, it’s one thing to know what
your body needs, but it’s another to always have access
to what it needs. Even if you have just eaten, if you don’t
know where your next meal is coming from, it will cause
you some distress until you do.
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 Physiological Needs
Thus, to have freedom from physiological desires, we
must be able to ensure we have access to what is required
to satisfy them for the foreseeable future. Even if you
know you’ll be losing your job in a month, if you have no
confirmed plans afterwards, you will experience distress
now, even though you know you’ll have meals and a roof
over your head for at least a month.
So, what are our options for ensuring we will always
have access to what we need? The most obvious one is
to have money. The convertibility of money means it
can serve many different purposes. How do we ensure
we will always have money? Some people will learn how
to effectively steal; some will learn the right times and
locations to beg; some will learn a skill to perform in
the street; some will develop an entrepreneurial spirit,
whether it’s selling drugs or trading through import/
export or opening their own business; some will sell their
bodies or similar services; and the majority will seek
other employment.
No matter how you choose to make money, you will
always face competition. If you’re finding it difficult to
compete at your current job, you’re going to face distress
that you’ll be squeezed out and then won’t have access
to the resources that you need. In this case, your options
are to either get training or education and do what is
required to make yourself more competitive, or move to
a field you’d be better in, though you’d have no guarantee
that things will go any better elsewhere. There are a lot
of hungry, motivated people out there who are willing
to work harder and learn their job better than others. If
you aren’t willing to do the work required to secure your
position within the field, you’ll always be in distress. The
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
stress from studying and working hard is much more
amenable than the distress of insecurity.
Besides being competitive in your field, there are other
possible sources of insecurity: overspecialisation and
dependence. Imagine the superstar athlete who knows
he’ll be a pro someday and gets passed through high school
without doing any work, and then gets passed through
university on a full athletic scholarship without doing any
work, and then gets injured in the beginning of the first
season as a pro and is unable to play professional sports
ever again. Their entire source of income disappears and
they’re not qualified to do anything else. They were so
focused and dedicated to one singular profession that
they didn’t develop any transferable skills. They put all
their eggs into one basket and then the bottom fell out of
the basket. The former athlete has to start all over again,
but from a perspective of desperation and failure rather
than one of hope.
While this is a relatively rare example, similar things
happen to many people. The same thing basically
happened to me. When I changed my military trade
to pilot, I no longer cared about my university degree
because it didn’t affect my job at all. When I left the
military, I was essentially starting all over again. While
there are many transferable skills from being a military
officer, especially in management and leadership,
civilians don’t recognise them. They’re probably afraid
that we have different ideas of leadership than they do,
even though we operate on organisational best practices
just as they do. This is actually a common problem for all
ex-military in Canada and the US, and I assume around
the rest of the world as well. If you’re an employer, ex-
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 Physiological Needs
military people are mature, diversely capable people;
if you find one qualified for your position, hire her if
you can. There are literally thousands of them out there
looking for work.
Besides ex-military and ex-athletes, there are many other
positions and industries that disappear. The oil industry
is one of the most lucrative industries in the world, but
due to environmental concerns and the turn to clean
energy, the entire industry is in distress. Anybody who is
specialised only for the oil industry is at risk of becoming
redundant. Also, advances in robotics are eliminating
jobs rapidly across many sectors. By ensuring that we’re
not dependent on the current job we have, through
the development of transferable skills and broadening
our training, we can help to improve our overall
employability and reduce our insecurity. By developing
the independent capability to find employment, we gain
power over our lives.
Money isn’t the only way to gain access to resources.
Children have access to resources even though they
have no income. This is because of their relationships.
While governments actually force parents to provide for
their children, most would do it anyway. Not only do
they provide food and clothing, but families often pay
for education and initial living expenses upon leaving
the home, or when they can’t afford it, they provide
training in independence and resourcefulness. Either
way, this highlights another source of relief from distress.
When we can form strong relationships with others that
include mutual trust, we’ll find that any time we are in
trouble, people will be willing to help. Everybody is
self-interested, but it is often in our best interest to help
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
others. If they feel that you will appreciate them for their
help and that you’d return the favour if the situation were
reversed, they would be getting something in return for
helping you. If you only form relationships with others
to get what you can from them, however, you’ll find it
a cold, lonely world when you need a helping hand.
Expanding our quality relationships reduces many of
our insecurities across all the categories of needs. While
relying on others is dependence, the ability to form many
quality relationships that can aid you when needed is an
independent capability as it reduces your dependence on
specific people.
Since I’ve become an adult, my father is not only my
parent, but he has become one of my best friends. While
he’d prefer seeing me live a more traditional lifestyle, he
supports me nonetheless. And, in turn, he knows that I
would help him with anything I can. Knowing that he is
there and willing to help me if I encounter trouble has
allowed me to live my life of experimentation. If I didn’t
feel that I had support, my fear of potential consequences
would force me to live a more traditional, stable life. That
said, I rarely ask him for anything. I need to know he’s
there to help me more than I actually need his help. I
wouldn’t change my life for any other, but my life can be
very unpredictable, so knowing that I have the support
of friends and family if I need it allows me to take risks.
This, in turn, allows me to learn more and gain more
independence so I will need less help.
So, we see that actual development is the expanding of
functionings to enhance our capabilities to satisfy our
needs. By learning to understand ourselves and what we
need, and then enhancing the ways we can get that, we’re
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 Physiological Needs
developing capabilities. Finding more ways to satisfy our
needs so we’re not dependent on anything or anyone
specific increases our independence. This gives us power
over our lives and frees us to focus our energies elsewhere.

43
 Lesson III
Safety Needs

The safety needs are, of course, the need to feel safe and
secure without fear, anxiety, or a feeling of chaos. While
travelling the world, I found myself in many dangerous,
fearful situations. My time in Central America was
especially rife with them. Central America is the most
dangerous area of the world, and machetes are common
tools so that anybody can get access to one. In Nicaragua,
while walking with three female travellers at night, we
were approached by three young guys with two machetes.
Two of them grabbed a woman each and held the blades
to their throats, so, of course, I threw up my hands and
they took everything we had. We knew we shouldn’t
have been there at night, but we had lost track of the
time while at a touristic site and there were no transport
options to get back to the safe area except walking. If
we had followed the usual safety rules, we would have
avoided that incident. Instead, the fear that it struck in us
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 Safety Needs
caused the three women to cancel their trips early and to
go home and for me to get out of Central America sooner
than planned.
When I was in Buenos Aires, I was living with four people
in a flat. One of the women, a European, had an incident
where somebody followed her home on her first night in
the city and tried to rape her. Luckily, he heard a sound
and ran off before he had a chance to rape her, but in the
entire month that I was there, she didn’t leave the flat. It
was her first time in the beautiful, vibrant city of Buenos
Aires and she was too afraid to go out and see the city.
Fear can be crippling.
Keeping up appearances
So, what can be done? Luckily, for me, I had the benefit
that I was a big, strong man, so if somebody was looking for
a target, they were likely going to choose somebody other
than me. Now, this is not simply a by the way statement,
but an actual workable strategy to reducing fear for some
people. Training and molding yourself into something
physically intimidating will reduce fear throughout your
life. While some people will automatically dismiss this as
macho, many people have spent a lot of time in the gym
for this very reason. Being a victim of bullying or feeling
small, weak, or insecure has driven many people to build
themself into somebody others won’t want to mess with.
I’m from an area where every male has to fight at some
point. If you’ve gotten away without fighting anybody,
somebody will pick a fight with you just to see where you
rank on the totem pole. The only person I know never to
have been in a fight was the biggest, strongest person in
the school. He didn’t want to pick on anybody else and
nobody dared pick a fight with him, even though nobody,
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
including himself, knew if he knew how to fight. There are
a lot of insecure people out there in the world looking for
somebody to victimise. Therefore, if you mold yourself
into somebody who causes them to think twice, you’re
going to feel much safer.
Street Smarts
Many people, however, won’t like the idea of building
themselves into an intimidating presence or can’t due
to their genetics. Another thing that can be done is to
develop street smarts. We need to know where we should
and shouldn’t be at any given time in our area. If we have
to be somewhere we shouldn’t be, don’t travel alone.
Uber, if you can. Carry mace or a whistle, or grip your
key between your fingers for self-defence. Don’t hesitate
to cross the street if somebody on your side looks sketchy.
Let people know where you are. Maybe even talk to
somebody on the phone while you’re walking.
Self-Defence
While we can try to avoid danger as much as possible,
sometimes danger comes looking for us. A lot of violence
happens in the home. During the pandemic, domestic
violence has been on the rise. If danger comes looking
for you, you need to be able to flee or defend yourself.
Unfortunately, in the case of domestic violence, defending
yourself will often make the situation worse as men often
become violent to their wives when they feel emasculated,
so defending yourself will make them feel it even more.
By all means, defend yourself, but then get away from
them. It doesn’t matter how nice somebody is when
they’re not beating you, if they’re beating you, they’re not
a good partner for you. How can you ever focus on your
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 Safety Needs
own development if you live in fear in your own home
every day? How can you focus on learning how to play an
instrument or taking online courses or developing your
friendships when your mind is consumed with how to
prevent your partner from beating you? What kind of
example is being set for children in an abusive home?
And how will your partner truly learn it’s wrong if you
continue to accept it? I know it’s not easy to escape from
such a situation, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening at
the alarming rate that it is, but you owe it to yourself to
examine your priorities and to choose your health and
well-being.
That being said, learning self-defence would be valuable
for anybody to reduce their fear and increase their feelings
of safety and security. An actual self-defence course
would likely be more valuable than studying Kungfu
or karate because it is tailored exactly to your needs,
while it would take a while studying a martial art from
the beginning before you’d be able to adequately defend
yourself. Martial arts are certainly beneficial, however, as
they can satisfy more needs than just that of safety.
Avoid, Avoid, Avoid
And, of course, another option, if you’re bold and free
enough, is to do what I did with Central America and
Chicago—get out or avoid. Every moment that I wasn’t in
my hotel or hostel in Central America, I felt in danger. Why
would anybody want to live like that? Central America is
a beautiful area of the world, but if you’re too afraid to
relax or to drop your guard, you can’t enjoy it. While I’ve
never been to Chicago, any research I did about the city
showed an extremely high crime rate compared to what
I’m used to. While people I talked to who lived there
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
said it’s safe enough, it’s only because they’ve become
accustomed to that level of crime and had developed the
requisite street smarts. While I’m sure I could have spent
a year there without anything happening to me, I didn’t
want the feeling of having to keep my guard up at all
times, so I gave up my scholarship and turned down the
offer. So, because of my fear, I lost out on an opportunity.
However, by applying to multiple universities, I was still
able to go to a good university and get the education I
wanted.
Public Speaking
Of course, not all fears are for our physical safety. One of
the most common fears, shared around the world, is that
of public speaking. When I was younger, I was mortified
at the thought of speaking up in a group. In fact, I don’t
remember my first speech, and I didn’t remember it
immediately afterwards either. My adrenaline and
cortisol were pumping so hard because of the fear I felt
that I essentially blacked out. People said I did a great
job, but I honestly couldn’t recall saying the words.
My fear came from feeling nobody wanted to hear what
I had to say, that I might bore them, that I might sound
stupid, that I’d mess it up, and that it would draw too much
attention to me. By putting yourself out there in front of
people, you risk having them pay more attention to you
at other times as well. When we’re insecure, we don’t
want people to see us, except for when we’re prepared for
it. Clearly, I have since changed, as I’m openly putting all
of my insecurities on the printed page for all the world to
see, and I have actually become a public speaking coach.
While I’ll address why I can share my insecurities with
you in the section on esteem, now I can share how to get
over the fear of public speaking.
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 Safety Needs
For your first forays into public speaking, the key
is preparation. If you know your speech by heart,
backwards and forwards, and you also fully understand
the content of the speech, it will be much less likely that
you’ll stumble during the speech. When I’m preparing for
giving a speech, it’s rolling through my head constantly
for days beforehand. These loops draw out any unnatural
parts so I can modify them and make the speech flow
better. Plus, repetition helps to imprint the speech in my
head. Beyond that, however, there’s also the art of public
speaking. We speak to be understood, not to be seen
or heard, but to be understood. We use pace, language,
emotion, emphasis, repetition, enunciation, and gestures
to most effectively get our point across. Emotion is key as
almost nobody will remember all that you said, as most
people’s brains don’t work that way. They’ll remember the
gist and the feelings they had during your speech. Go for
an emotional rollercoaster, with highs and lows, because
it’s difficult or undesirable to hold the same emotion for
an extended period of time.
Gestures are very important. We certainly don’t want to
stand still like a robot, and we don’t want to go with the
flow too much either. If you watch people who’ve never
spoken in public before, and ask them to speak on the
spot, you’ll see a lot of really strange gestures being made
that they’re not even aware of. As you’re practicing, video
record yourself and look for these strange gestures and
cut them out. Do research, prepare, and practice and
your prepared speeches will be much less frightening.
As you get used to being in front of people, you’ll gain
confidence and the ability to speak unprepared as well.

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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
Managing Chaos
Another aspect of our safety needs is that we wish to
avoid chaos. But recall that I essentially painted the life
of freedom as one of chaos, which accounts for why most
people have a fear of freedom. However, not all chaos
is the same. If I take you from your penthouse flat and
your lifetime of quiet luxury and drop you in a jungle in
Borneo, that will be absolute chaos. You will be lost and
afraid and completely unaware of how to remedy your
situation.
While that example isn’t mine, I had a similar experience
when I first started travelling. I’ve already published an
article about it, but essentially, I went from living around
Canada, rarely in large cities, straight to Cairo, Egypt,
one of the largest cities in the world. I was completely
alone, didn’t have a phone or the Internet, and I didn’t
know anybody there. When I arrived, the services at the
airport were closed, so I was scammed by a taxi driver
and arrived at my hotel where they didn’t speak English
or have my reservation. I took a walk around the area and
nothing was in English. I had no idea where I was in the
city. I had no access to information, and I didn’t know
anybody. It was chaos. I said to myself, What the f--- was
I thinking? This isn’t me; I don’t belong here. That night, I
actually cried myself to sleep. The next day, however, my
military empowerment came back to me, and I went in
search of a foothold, and from there I found a lifeline and
everything was fine. Now, if you drop me anywhere in the
world, I’ll figure things out and be fine.
The key is preparation. I wasn’t prepared, and it was
absolute chaos. Now I am prepared for many things, and
I can enter into seemingly chaotic situations and deal
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 Safety Needs
with them. I’m sure having a child for the first time can
be chaotic, but if you’re properly prepared, at least the
experience can be a managed chaos, in which it’s still
difficult, but you’re not curling up into a ball in the corner
of the room and giving up.
One of the most important aspects of military flight
training is emergency training; there is no room for
error. In fact, if you make an error more than once, you
may be removed from the program. The idea is that if you
see all the things that can possibly go wrong and train for
them so you actually feel the emergency and go through
the motions to fix it, then you won’t panic as much when
the actual emergency happens. Learn to anticipate all
the things that can go wrong and prepare for them. This
will greatly increase your feeling of safety throughout
everything in your life.
Seek Help
Many people choose to suffer their fears alone, without
ever seeking solutions. If we seek help or try to improve
ourselves, we’re afraid it will reveal our insecurities or
force us to share our burdens. We want to present the
image that we’re strong and independent, even if we’re
not. However, living in fear is far more crippling than the
vulnerability that comes from sharing with somebody
we trust, whether it’s with the police, friends, family,
authority figures, doctors, psychologists etc. No matter
what reason you have to feel afraid or unsafe, it will benefit
you greatly to seek help, and there are many people out
there who want to help.
So, if we return to our framework, if we want the
independent capability to be and feel safe, we need to
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
increase our functionings to support that, which include
the development of awareness, training, preparation,
avoidance, and seeking help, among others. When we are
freed from fear, the world opens up to us.

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 Lesson IV
Social Needs

Maslow calls this section the Love and Belonging Needs,

but as I am attempting a re-education in love, it isn’t fitting
to use the word in this way. However, words are failing
me, and I’m at a loss for what other short title will do.
Belonging is correct, but it doesn’t encompass the whole
of these needs. Social, is in effect, too broad, as even the
esteem needs are partly social needs. Trust, intimacy,
affection, closeness, connection, and friendship, along
with belonging, encompass much of the social needs.
Humans are social animals. As much as you might
imagine yourself a lone wolf, a desperado, or a strong
independent person, you need connections to other
people to be happy and healthy. Any time you feel that you
don’t need closeness with others, it’s likely because some
other set of needs is taking priority or you’re distracting
yourself. Often, people’s insecurities over their esteem, or
their survival, or even their self-actualisation (SA) cause
them to disregard their social needs.
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
Loneliness
Over the past 20 years, I have rarely spent more than a
year at a time in any given city or country. I often go years
without seeing family or specific friends. I have let my
esteem and SA needs dominate my life.
When people hear my story, they usually say they
couldn’t do it and I must surely be lonely living such a
life. However, the constant moving hasn’t caused too
much of a problem because I usually make new friends
wherever I go, meaning that my social needs are largely
met. However, over the past two years, my esteem and
SA needs have brought me to situations where it was very
difficult to satisfy my social needs and they have made
themselves quite visible to me. Not since I was young and
too shy to make connections with people have I felt so
alone, and it’s because I have been actively neglecting
and disregarding my social needs.
I would be lying if I said I never felt lonely during my
travels before the past two years. While it wasn’t often
that I felt lonely, it didn’t seem acceptable for me to admit
when I did. I felt that admitting that I was sometimes
lonely in the life I chose would prove my way of living to
be a failure. I know I’m definitely not the only person out
there who is afraid to admit when they’re lonely. Most
people who are lonely are afraid to admit it because an
admission would make them seem like a failure, too.
As I’m writing this during the pandemic of 2020, it’s an
especially lonely time for most people in the world. It’s
important to acknowledge how we feel so we can set
about finding solutions for our feelings.

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 Social Needs
Shutting off Signals
When we’re lonely, lacking affection and belonging, our
body sends us signals warning us that we need to attend
to them. However, we don’t come with a fancy display
screen telling us exactly what that feeling is so we can
address it. All we know is that we have a need that isn’t
being fulfilled. It’s like the stupid check engine light on the
dashboard that stays there forever because the car seems
to be running fine. We add gas, change the oil and hope
for the best. We have ways, however, to shut off signals
from the body.
Drugs and alcohol temporarily disrupt these signals,
and a lot of substance abuse is related to unmet social
needs. We can also drain our body so much that the brain
recognises that we need time to process and repair, and
we turn off the signal. When we exercise, our blood and
resources go into the affected muscles, and for a long
time after they stay there to help the body repair. When
we eat, a lot of our blood and body’s resources go into
digestion, giving us a few hours respite. During sex, our
blood flows to our genitals and our body is preoccupied
with other feelings, blocking out the signal. While it’s
generally longer for males than for females, after sex
there’s a refractory period, in which the body needs time
to recharge and signals are either muted or ignored.
Intellectual stimulation also involves a rearrangement of
the body’s resources to temporarily mute the feeling of
unmet needs. Books, TV, the Internet, and video games
are often used. It’s possible that my own philosophising
from a young age might be attributable to my feelings of
loneliness at the time.

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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
I hope it’s understood that I’m not posing that these are
valid replacements for forming close relationships with
others, but giving insight as to the possible motivations
for your methods of distraction. Development is the
addressing of our needs and developing the capabilities
to satisfy them. Distraction is arrested development. It’s
not that distraction doesn’t have its place as we sometimes
need time to decompress, gain distance from something,
subconsciously process, and repair. Nietzsche spoke of
our horizons, saying that we extend them when we’re
feeling safe and invigorated, and we draw them in during
times of distress and recuperation. So, there are times
when we need to take baby steps before we can get back
to leaps and bounds.
Setting the Social Needs Straight
So, what exactly are the social needs? The social needs are
a little less straightforward than the other needs because
they often overlap and are interwoven with others, with
the social needs being the tie that binds them all together.
There almost doesn’t need to be a separate section for
social needs because most of our reasons for being social
extend into every other category as well. We seek social
bonds and belonging for our physical needs, for safety and
security, for esteem, and as purpose in our life. However,
since the aim of this book is to reduce and explain to create
awareness and impetus for change, we will continue as
we are. And, if we need social relationships to satisfy
all of our other needs, we need to understand and gain
independence within our social spheres to improve our
satisfaction of other needs as well.
The social needs beg us to form close relationships with
others. We are vulnerable beings with constantly erected
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 Social Needs
shields around us, so we long to meet people that we can
drop our shields with, revealing ourselves to them and
being seen for who we are. Animals display their feelings
so they can be understood, but we’ve learned to conceal
most of our feelings, and thus, are rarely understood.
Physical Closeness
We also long for physical connections: hand shakes, hand
holding, full body hugs, a pat on the back, squeezing
a shoulder, caressing a cheek, stroking the hair, and
cuddling. In many Latin American countries, when you
see a group of friends together, they’re often all physically
linked in some way. This one is leaning against that one,
that one has his hand on the leg of the next, the next has
her arm around the next, and the next is clasping the
shoulder of the next, etc. There is an openness and a
comfort in physical connections. They also hug and kiss
when they meet or say goodbye.
In Europe, some countries have this physical closeness
as well. In the Middle East you often see men holding
hands and often maintaining physical contact with each
other in some way. In my classrooms in China, the girls
are often hanging all over each other and the boys hang
all over each other as well. They’re perfectly comfortable
touching their friends and being touched. In Canada and
the US, however, a handshake is as far as many men will
go with each other. A man that hugs other men would be
very ‘new age’. In schools in Latin America and China, and
I assume many other places as well, teachers hug students,
they pat them on the back, they put their hand on their
shoulders. A Canadian or American teacher would very
rarely ever touch a student in any way and would say
that it is wrong to do so. But, welcome, trusted, physical
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
contact is a necessary part of the human experience. It’s
a big, potentially bad world out there, and we often need
that physical comfort to know that somebody is there for
us.
A Part of Something Bigger
We also have a need to feel that we belong to something
larger than ourselves. When you’re a part of a group,
people don’t mess with you; instead, they mess with your
group. So, we feel a need to belong to a family, a group
of friends, a clan, an institution, a community, a gang,
a race, a gender, a sexuality, a movement, a country, a
religion. We want to be around like-minded people who
understand, accept, and support us. It is thought that
many people join gangs because they’re looking for this
camaraderie, this sense of belonging, this family of choice
that they’re not getting elsewhere.
We usually seek belonging at the micro level among
friends and family; however, if we find it difficult to form
close relationships on that level, we’ll expand our scope
until we find the home we fit into. Often, when we’ve
been rejected from many of the micro-spheres, such as
friends and family, we’ll take refuge and solace in the
larger spheres that usually can’t reject us because we’re
too insignificant amongst them, such as race, gender,
sexuality, country, and religion. While specific members
of a country might call you a bad patriot, it is unlikely,
nearly impossible, that the actual country, represented
by its leader, will disavow you and remove you from the
country.

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 Social Needs
If 2020 can be characterised by anything, it’s the pandemic,
economic decline, and protests. The pandemic is roaring
across the world and forcing isolation on us all. Some
people are lucky to be quarantined with family, friends
or loved ones, while others are completely alone. But
everybody has been cut off from their communities and
their groups. The Internet flared up like never before as
everybody tried to form some kind of connection with
others. Then protests started erupting around the world,
and they grew in size and strength mostly because social
division caused distress and a yearning to be a part of
something again.
Mass protests are a frenzy of ‘hivemind’. We are often at
odds with people all around us, so to be in a crowd of
so many people with everybody oriented in the same
direction is a thrill that we rarely ever get to experience
in life. People are willing to risk prison or police brutality
to be a part of these protests. Of course, there are actual
elements of demands for justice, but very few people in
any of the protests can actually envision what that justice
would look like or how it can be attained. It’s the feeling of
being a welcome part of something bigger than ourselves
that draws us out.
Because we are stories—vectors—our identities can seem
very vague, fluid, and formless, and we often have a very
difficult time explaining who we are. We’ll say, I’m like this,
but at the same time, I’m not really like this. Everything
we can say about ourselves, we can also contradict. I’m
honest, except when I want to save somebody’s feelings. So,
in an effort to give shape to our identity, we look to our
associations:
• A male
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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
• A heterosexual
• A Whelan
• A Newfoundlander
• A Canadian
• A student
• A teacher
• A philosopher
• X’s friend
• Y ’s partner
• A member of whatever
We define ourselves by our associations. The street-thief
Aladdin surely identified himself differently once he
became the husband of Princess Jasmine.
Healthy Relationships and Happiness
Harvard University carried out a study over 80 years that
involved following the lives of a group of students and
their offspring so they could determine the factors that
lead to happiness and healthy living. The study concluded
that healthy relationships were, by far, the leading factor
when it came to aging well and lifetime happiness. The
problem with that conclusion, however, and I hope they
return to the data to correct it or it will have been a colossal
waste of time, is that healthy relationships are by-products
and not goals in and of themselves. Healthy, happy, and
secure people have healthy relationships. Many factors
are involved in developing healthy relationships, and I’m
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sure if you haven’t experienced this yourself, you’ve seen
it in the relationships around you.
In order to establish what allows us to have healthy
relationships, whether friendly or romantic, we have to
first accept several truths. We must be reminded that all
people are self-interested all the time. Nobody is selfless
in a friendship or romantic relationship. This does not
mean that your friends or lovers are blatantly using
you, or that they don’t really like you, but they’re in the
relationship for what they can get. If the relationship isn’t
giving them what they need, they’re not going to enjoy
it and will eventually seek to end it. And before you start
pointing the accusatory finger at your friends and lovers,
remember that you’re also in the relationship because
you’re getting something you need from it.
Healthy relationships provide a mutual satisfaction of
needs. In a typical relationship, both people are seeking
security in the satisfaction of their social needs, but a
healthy relationship also gives added security in the
satisfaction of all needs. As long as both are equally
giving and taking, the relationship works. In the case of
the rich old man with the young trophy wife, he’s mostly
seeking esteem and satisfying his lust, while she’s mostly
seeking financial security, as well as the esteem that
comes from living the high life. The relationship works,
until it doesn’t.
Incompatibility
We must remember that when we develop the capability
to satisfy a need and gain security over the satisfaction of
that need, we also gain freedom from the necessity of that
need. Our needs determine our motivation, so when the
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priority of our needs changes, our motivation changes.
So, we enter relationships to satisfy specific needs, such
as the need for contact and intimacy, but once we’re
comfortable in the relationship, we’re not lonely anymore
and our need for intimacy is being satisfied, so we’re freed
from those needs and our motivation shifts. What it shifts
to is personal and depends on your own development of
capabilities to satisfy your needs, which will be different
for everybody at any given time.
So, while both people likely entered a relationship to
satisfy the same needs, after the relationship settles, both
people might have completely different directions they
want to move in, or one gains motivation while the other
has an arrested development, or both do, as they choose
to distract themselves from any other needs they may have.
A truth that must be accepted is that not all people are
compatible with all other people. Just because you really
like a specific person, and you feel you need that person,
does not mean that you two should be together. If a
relationship fails, or if somebody refuses you after many
advances, save both of you the negative drama, accept
that it’s not going to happen, and move on. Obsession can
lead people to deep, dark places and can cause problems
that will affect their other relationships.
Another truth to accept is that not all people are at the
same stage of development and do not have the same
needs and priorities at the same time. It’s possible that
you’re right for each other but not right now. I’ve been
privileged to have met and dated many amazing women
over the past 15 years, but I have never been even remotely
close to being ready to give up other aspects of my life to
pursue a serious relationship. It’s not you, it’s me has been
absolutely true all this time.
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Another serious truth that must be accepted is that
nobody needs to accept you for who you are. As I said
earlier, you aren’t anything static anyway, you’re a story
and a vector, and your identity is fluid and formless.
The question is, is your story attractive to the kind of
person you’re attracted to? What can you contribute to a
relationship besides a warm body? I’ve met many people
who consider themselves lazy and unmotivated and yet
say they want to find somebody who’ll accept them for
who they are.
All of life is a competition for attention and resources,
but if you don’t attempt to compete, you won’t get
any of them. The lazy and unmotivated still end up in
relationships, thanks to alcohol and the kismet of one
lonely person meeting another, but it likely won’t be the
relationship you want and likely won’t be the healthiest
of relationships.
Identity and Adaptation
Staying on the topic of being who you are, for the majority
of our lives, we are different people in different situations.
We often have a different character when we’re with our
grandparents, our parents, our friends, our lovers, our
colleagues, our supervisors, in front of police, in a house
of worship, and when we’re alone. We are all actors and
sometimes it can be difficult to know who is the real us.
The truth is, they all are.
Part of mastering oneself is mastering our roles in each
situation. Improve as a child, as a friend, as a lover, as
a colleague, as an employee, as a citizen, as a religious
adherent, and as a person. When we do this, we improve
our relationships, but we also eventually come to be a
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singular person, similar in all situations because who we
become works in all situations.
In ancient Chinese philosophy attributed to Confucius,
people were expected to fulfill carefully created roles.
Extreme attention was paid to rituals, so that nearly all
parts of life and actions were scripted. The rituals included
things such as which side of bed to get out on, how to part
hair, where to look during certain situations, and many
hundreds or thousands of other rituals. The idea was that
if you fulfilled a role that was characterised by duty, honor,
integrity, etc., you would eventually gain those attributes.
It was a kind of fake it ‘til you make it philosophy. The
advantage that they saw is that, even during the chaos
of early development, at least everybody would be acting
courteously to each other. Then life would be predictable,
and society would be harmonious. In a way, it’s similar
to military philosophies on training: we enter essentially
as kids and are forced to act like mature, responsible,
honorable people until we eventually become one. This
training has drawbacks, for sure, but it also has benefits.
So, if you want to be attractive or to make friends, develop
yourself into the person that is attractive and good to be
friends with. What attracts people is different in different
cultures and across different classes. We can pick up
hobbies and gain skills and abilities that are popular,
creating common ground, but also ones that are rare, thus
setting ourselves apart and making us exotic. Developing
ourselves through learning different things also helps us
to broaden our horizons and build confidence.
There are branches of feminism in which people refuse
to adhere to society’s views of beauty, and not all for the
same reason, but the result is often as it is with the rebel.
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When you openly defy society before you’ve already been
accepted by it, you close yourself off to the opportunities
that society can provide. This is a case of the self-
actualisation need overpowering the need for intimacy
and belonging. We all need social relationships, and
reducing your opportunities reduces your independence.
As I have said, as needs are independent, they can be
satisfied independently, reducing needs for romantic
relationships. It’s a personal choice. However, if you find
that your social and esteem needs are suffering because
of your political views, it would be in your interest to
find a way to reconcile that. For those who might say
their devotion to the cause is more important than their
personal needs satisfaction, remember that even your
devotion is self-interested.
Social skills
I have met many people who are very talented or who
have travelled the world gaining tremendous experience
and insight, yet they’re still very awkward socially
because they likely aren’t taking advantage of enough
opportunities to develop their social skills. These skills
are developed through practice, though I know it sounds
like the whole spiel, You need experience to get a job, but
you need a job to get experience. In the age we live in,
there are many networking websites that allow strangers
with similar interests to meet, all understanding that
likely many of the people there don’t know anybody else.
You don’t get invited; you just sign up. It’s far easier than
applying for an internship. Go to these and learn to find
your voice—it’ll happen. Pay attention to how people
react when you speak and you’ll learn whether you’re
doing well or not.
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I was very shy and awkward, and it wasn’t until I started
drinking alcohol that I was able to find my voice. But
it wasn’t simply the alcohol itself, but what I realised
through drinking. I was always so afraid to speak, afraid
to say something stupid, but then I drank and said stupid
things and people didn’t care, and some even laughed. I
realised right away that it meant I could speak without
alcohol and it would likely be the same. I’m certainly not
saying everybody should drink alcohol, but it can help to
get the ball, or the tongue, rolling. That being said, many
people rely on alcohol as a crutch, they depend on it for
years and maybe their whole life. Develop yourself to get
over your shyness.
Alcohol can help to loosen you up as you get started and
help you gain some new experiences. Unfortunately,
alcohol has also become the common ground of many,
and if you don’t drink, you may find yourself excluded
from many social situations. I tried to quit drinking
altogether at one point because I didn’t feel I needed it
anymore, but I still went to drinking outings. I found a
lot of people feeling uncomfortable drinking around
somebody who isn’t, so I’ve since resumed drinking
socially simply to reduce the anxiety of the group.
Mutual Vulnerability
So, once you’ve made yourself interesting and attractive
and have gotten yourself into social situations, how do
we become close with somebody? When we first meet
somebody, we have layers of barriers erected all around
us to keep people out and to keep us safe and secure
inside. We want them to see our façade but nothing of
our true interior. However, as long as we’re doing this,
others are as well, so we only see their façades and never
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their true selves. To get close to somebody, we need to
start shedding these layers as they shed theirs—mutual
vulnerability. This is not so straightforward as it works
differently in different societies and situations.
During military basic training, my troopmates and I were
in constant distress, 24/7, and we felt we had a common
enemy: our instructors. With that constant mental,
physical, and emotional distress the façades naturally
melt away, you can’t keep up the act. Since it was actually
our duty to work together, and since we all wanted to
help each other pass the tests and hurdles thrown at us
by our instructors, we bonded very quickly in our mutual
vulnerability. We all saw each other at our worst and we
looked at each other with understanding, compassion,
and trust. Within weeks, the relationships we formed
were some of the closest we ever had in our lives.
I didn’t date in high school, but once I started drinking
and losing my inhibitions and moved to the city to go to
university, I started dating prodigiously. I started noticing
that even if I had a one- night-stand, I could talk about
things with them that I couldn’t with my friends; there was
an unexpected closeness. I realised that the act of sex, the
baring all before each other and the sharing of pleasure
quickly smashed down all the layers of vulnerability.
To this day, many of my best friends are women that I have
dated because we’ve gone to the depths of vulnerability
together. For a while, I was actually using sex as a way
to get closer to people, and I felt like I couldn’t truly be
friends with a woman unless I slept with her. It was much
later that I realised we can show mutual vulnerability and
gain closeness in a simple conversation and that the sex
wasn’t necessary.
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The breaking down of barriers isn’t simple and it varies
based on each side’s culture and situation. On average,
Canadians, for example, are very afraid of putting
themselves out there, very afraid of rejection. So, when
two Canadians are interested in each other, even just as
friends, they often put out very subtle hints, hoping the
other will pick up on it and return with a subtle hint of
their own. People are generally afraid of vulnerability
because they don’t want to reveal their own vulnerability
or see others’ vulnerability unless they’re ready. So, if you
express your undying love for somebody before the menu
arrives, you’re likely going to scare them away. But that’s
Canada.
In many parts of Latin America, however, the man is
expected to be overt from the start. If you’re not overt,
you’re not interested, so subtlety will get you nowhere.
For this reason, Latinas who go to Canada often find
dating to be frustrating. Having dated all over the world,
I can attest that it can get very confusing trying to keep all
the local dating cultures straight. Now, having been in so
many cultures, I basically don’t know how to flirt anymore,
because every type of flirtation is offensive somewhere. I
can still have conversations of mutual vulnerability, but I
think that’s better left to be learned than explained. The
idea, however, is to lead in the sharing of vulnerability,
just a little, to see if they bite and want to continue down
that path. People have strong reactions to vulnerability
and either embrace it or run from it.
Relationships as Catch-All’s
Before we finish this section, it’s important to recognise
that many people seek romantic relationships as a catch-
all. A relationship can serve to help us satisfy most of our
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needs but the risk is like the fisherman putting all of his
fish in one basket. Relying on specific relationships to
satisfy our needs is an example of a dependent capability.
When we depend on our relationship for all or most of
our needs, the most important thing in our lives becomes
the actual relationship, not the other person, but the
relationship itself. When we pin our hopes, happiness,
and everything else on our relationship, we’re deathly
afraid of letting it fail. We fight to keep the relationship,
but not necessarily the other person. Now, what does
that mean? If you noticed that your partner started
taking an interest in another person, and you wanted
to keep your relationship with them, the healthy thing
to do would be to enter into competition with the other
by making yourself seem like, or become, the better
option. Too many people seek to preserve a relationship
through jealousy and control, which actually hurts
the relationship and pushes their partner away. When
somebody puts everything into their relationship and
makes it their life, it’s understandable that the distress
could lead to irrational action that is entirely unhealthy
and not beneficial.
When we expect a relationship to satisfy all of our needs,
we might be taking more from the relationship than we’re
giving, creating an imbalance and too many demands on
our partners. When we develop ourselves and learn to
satisfy our needs independently, we naturally demand
less from the relationship, reducing our dependence on
the relationship, and the number of potential problems
we will have. The more you develop yourself, the more
interesting and attractive you make yourself for your
partner or for whoever may come after them. You can
also work together with your partner to develop your
independent capabilities.
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We absolutely need other people for affection, intimacy,
and belonging. We can’t satisfy these needs on our own,
but for everything else we can. Affection, of course,
is positive, welcome contact and closeness involving
displays of comfort, care, and acceptance. Intimacy is a
close feeling of trust and mutual vulnerability, as if you
can share anything and be accepted and understood.
And, belonging, as we’ve spoken of, is the feeling of
being a part of something greater than ourselves, such as
a friendship, couple, group, family, etc. I’m not sure if it’s
become evident to you yet, but we don’t need a romantic
relationship for any of these. I’ve been able to comfortably
abstain from serious relationships for so long because I
get affection and intimacy from friends and belonging
from multiple sources. I will eventually want children
and a little more constancy in my life, but that will be for
the satisfaction of other needs.
Social Capabilities as Power
Returning to our framework, if we expand our
functionings, that is, the things we do to make ourselves
interesting and attractive to others, and also the way we
meet and interact with others, we’ll develop independent
social capabilities, freeing us from distress over our social
lives. Many people spend much of their lives attending
to their social lives, so this is significant. Furthermore,
developing independent capabilities to satisfy all of our
other needs will place less strain and dependence on our
relationships, allowing for healthier interactions with
others.
I can’t stress enough how important this is. Independent
capabilities give you power over your life. The feeling of
loneliness is often a feeling of powerlessness; in other
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words, you want people in your life, but you feel you
can’t or don’t know how. When you learn how to satisfy
social needs in many different ways, you gain that power.
I’ve said I’ve been lonely at times during my travels, and
then most acutely over the past two years, but at every
moment I could have gone out and made friends or
found somebody to date if I really wanted to because I’ve
developed that capability. It’s like the difference between
fasting and actual starvation: the person who is fasting is
in control and can choose to end it whenever they want,
while the person who is starving is in extreme distress
because they don’t know if they’ll ever eat again. So, even
when I’m lonely, it’s by choice, so there’s an unmet need
without the insecurity, and there’s power to control the
situation.

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 Lesson V
Esteem Needs

As humans, we have a strong desire for strength, capability,

and power, as defined earlier. We want to set our minds
to something and then achieve it. We want to feel that
we have power over our own lives and can determine,
at least part of, our own fate. Not only do we wish for
strength and capability, but we desire to be recognised as
having such as well. We want others to see us as attractive
and capable of getting things done. These are the esteem
needs.
Inadequacy
I said that I was shy while growing up, and it probably
didn’t make sense at the time, as I was strong and capable
and I was achieving things that were out of reach for most
others. However, I grew up in a broken home. My mother
abandoned us when I was three, and my subsequent
stepmother was unsupportive and often demeaning.
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No matter what I did, it was never enough, so I didn’t
have the feeling that I was strong, capable, or desired. In
our unhappy home, everybody sought their own quiet
corner, and it was rare that I had any real conversations
with adults. So, while I was the top student, I felt that
everybody knew so much more than I did because they
were gaining knowledge about the world through their
parents and friends, of which I had few. As a philosopher,
feeling that everybody knew more than I did rendered
me feeling quite powerless.
At the end of military basic training, we had the task of
each ranking everybody on the course. I ranked myself
8th out of 30. When the instructors saw this, they came
to me and said that I was by far the top candidate on the
course, and they asked why I ranked myself so low. I made
a joke and dismissed it, but in truth I felt inadequate next
to these seven other people because each had something
I didn’t have, not recognising that I also had capabilities
they didn’t have.
My feelings of inadequacy prevented me from ever
dreaming big or feeling that I would ever matter. It wasn’t
until I was around 30, having learned and developed as
I did through the military, and then travelling the world,
exploring and learning all that I had, that I finally allowed
myself to feel good about who I was and what I could
accomplish. But even then, it wasn’t easy or natural.
After studying enlightenment yoga in Thailand, I stopped,
looked at myself and took stock of all I had done, all I
knew, and all I was capable of, and compared myself
to others. I had to admit to myself that I was worthy of
feeling good about myself, and that if I was ever going to
do anything that mattered in my life, I’d require higher
self-esteem. So, I set about cultivating my esteem.
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Esteem Cultivation
I essentially started challenging myself, putting myself
into increasingly new and chaotic situations to test my
ability to adapt and overcome. This was when I first
started discussing my philosophies with other people.
While I quickly excelled in the challenges I dove into,
my first forays into philosophical debate did not go so
well. Before we put our thoughts into words, they are
essentially a formless cloud in our minds, and only when
we try to give them shape do we begin to see the error
of our ways. While I was made a fool of in my first few
attempts at explaining love, I quickly saw the weakness
in my own arguments, and the validity of my friends’
counterarguments, forcing me to re-evaluate all of my
philosophies as I put them into words. So, while I had
several humiliating moments, the lessons I learned have
since set my life on a path I never would have imagined.
Another extremely important task in the cultivation of
esteem is acceptance. We compare ourselves to others on
so many metrics. We will always find somebody who is
funnier, sexier, smarter, stronger, bolder, more popular,
more talented, etc. If you can improve in those areas,
by all means, do so, but if not, all we can do is accept.
Change what you can, accept what you cannot. It’s okay
for others to have attributes we don’t have. I’ve seen
many people actually hate others because they see them
having something they don’t have. But it’s not really a
hate for the other person, it’s envy, and essentially hating
ourselves. Embrace differences, learn from others, and
even compete with them, but without hostility. The only
person suffering from your envy is you. It is in your best
interest to accept others and benefit from your association
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with them. As perfect as you think they are, you might
even find they envy you for some reason as well.
There’s a trend among self-help communities that
affirmation alone can increase self-esteem. That saying
to oneself over and over again things like, I am strong, I
am worthy, I deserve more, can increase self-esteem. This
is one of the things I referred to in the beginning of the
book as yogic disillusion. I saw many people within the
yoga community seeking to delude themselves to avoid
their problems. The problem is that their illusions don’t
survive acute distress. You need to believe something
because it’s true, not simply because you say it over and
over again.
The Delusion of Deservedness
Another hard truth to learn is that you don’t deserve
anything. Nobody deserves anything. There are no hard
rules in life. If you want to buy something from me, I can
take your money and give you nothing in return. Society
says I can’t do that and I might suffer socially and legally
for doing it, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can take
from you and give you nothing in return. The idea that
you deserve something in return is a construct.
If a turtle helps to carry a tiger across a river on its back,
can we say the turtle then deserves not to be eaten by
the tiger? Society says yes, but nature and reality say no.
Everybody is self-interested, nobody owes you anything,
and you do not owe anything to anybody else. It is often
in our interest to make deals with and promises to others,
but there are no real rules and we don’t need to live up to
them. That being said, the purpose of this line of thought
is not to promote selfishness, because that can have many
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negative repercussions socially and esteem-wise, but to
do away with the thought of deservedness.
What benefit is there to giving up deservedness? Many
negative feelings associated with low esteem come from
the feeling that we deserve something or deserve better
than what we’re getting. You might feel that you deserve a
promotion, or recognition from your family for the hard
work you do, or better treatment from customer service,
or for your friends to be there for you whenever you need
them. Americans and Canadians often say that we all
deserve love. No, we absolutely do not deserve love, or
anything else, and to believe so can only have negative
repercussions. Why? First, it gives us the feeling that life
or others are being unfair when we’re not getting what
we deserve because, if we deserve it, we should be getting
it, yes?
Second, if we feel we deserve love, or any special treatment,
and then get it, we appreciate it less because we’re just
getting what’s due to us. Life is so much more beautiful
when we don’t feel we deserve love, friendship, and
civility, etc. because then we can genuinely appreciate it
when we receive it, acknowledging that others don’t owe
us, they don’t need to treat us this way, but they choose to
treat us in such a way. Everybody is at the center of their
own stage, but for that moment, they choose to share the
center of their stage with us. Appreciate that because you
don’t deserve it.
The Quick Fix
One of the major reasons people seek hookups and one-
night-stands is esteem. A one-night-stand briefly satisfies
the needs for sex, closeness and intimacy, curiosity, and
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esteem, though not always or for everyone. Every time
somebody chooses you, you feel accepted, desired, and
desirable. The jealousy of your friends, and the fact that
you were chosen and others weren’t, raises your esteem
amongst your peers. However, it’s a short-lived high and
comes with feelings of shame. You’re not calling your
parents to tell them you had a one-night-stand, and if
you’re the type who does, you’re likely not expecting a
pat on the back. So, it makes the act addictive; people
seek out the hookup as a temporary boost.
Substance abuse is the same. Even though alcohol is
technically a depressant, people feel good about their
ability to socialise while drunk. Being able to make people
laugh, get the party going, and get sexual attention far
outweigh the negative consequences for most. Similarly,
cocaine invigorates and gives a major esteem boost
without any relation to others at all; no actions necessary.
During my first years of university, I was getting drunk,
and wanted to get drunk, four to five times per week.
I wasn’t drinking to dull a pain, and I didn’t have an
addiction to alcohol, as I’ve often gone sober for months
without even noticing it. I was just addicted to the lowered
inhibitions and the temporary esteem. Likewise, I’ve
seen many people chasing the esteem that comes from
a cocaine high. And, when substances aren’t helping you
get an esteem boost, they’re also helping you to turn off
the signals for esteem deprivation, as they do for unmet
social needs.
A major problem the world over, is that, often, people
overeat because it helps to shut off these feelings of esteem
deprivation. But while they’re overeating out of guilt and
shame, it is then exacerbated by the shame of overeating.
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Self-Mastery as Esteem Building
So, how else do we develop real and lasting esteem?
Development and cultivation of ourselves. Instead
of spending your time chanting mantras, spend it
turning yourself into somebody who is strong and
capable. Develop the capabilities to satisfy your needs
independently. Dependence—the feeling that you rely
on substances or other people for your survival or well-
being—is a sure recipe for low self-esteem. As I said in
the previous section, our relationships are closely related
to our self-esteem. Cultivate yourself into somebody who
people have reason to value and being valued will go a
long way towards you learning to value yourself.
Face and conquer your fears. Getting over my fear of
public speaking and talking to women drastically changed
my life. When we feel we don’t have a voice, we certainly
can’t feel like we have power to determine our own fate.
These things don’t change over night, but we can begin
working on them immediately.
Don’t be afraid of failure. One of the greatest things I
have to offer is that I have failed at more things than most
people, simply because I’ve sought out and done more
things than others. Many times, I go into experiences
fully expecting to fail, but I push forward because I’m
also expecting a learning lesson. Look at failure as a step
forward, not a step back. Before you attempted the failed
act, you had less information than afterwards. Learn all
you can from your failures and incorporate them into
your life: this is development.
Before I moved to India to try and start a women’s
empowerment NGO, one of my best friends said to me,
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You realise you will likely fail, right? My answer was, I
might come out of there without starting an NGO, but it
won’t be a failure. And, indeed, it wasn’t. I learned a lot
simply from the endeavour and used that to fuel the next
several years of my life. In the words of Rocky Balboa, It
ain’t how hard you hit, it’s how hard you can get hit and
keep moving forward.
Recognition
It is not enough for us to feel strong, capable, and
successful; others must recognise it as well. We attempt to
delude ourselves so much that we often can’t tell if we’re
being honest with ourselves.
Often it takes validation from the outside to convince
us that we are what we think we are. Some people might
say, I don’t care what others think, but they do and we all
do. One of the easiest ways to see this is through social
media. The trend is to paint a picture of your life as if
it’s perfect, but if your life were perfect, you wouldn’t be
seeking so much attention on social media. Many people
are likely in denial about why they post, but 9 times out
of 10, it’s to gain attention. Now, social media certainly
isn’t the only predictor of low esteem, but it’s the most
evident in our time. The world of social media is fast and
people consume without digesting. Your post is likely
one of hundreds they’ve consumed that day. If you stop
posting, most people likely won’t even notice. Besides
a like or brief comment, there’s very little meaningful
feedback through social media. We foolishly count our
esteem in the number of likes rather than the content of
the liker’s approval.
It’s impossible to overestimate the problem that social
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media is having on the esteem of most people, especially
young people. There’s evidence that suicides of young
girls have skyrocketed due to social media. Of course, our
own truths cannot stand up to others’ doctored realities.
While we have a need to increase our esteem relative to
others, it’s important that we do it with real face-to-face
interaction. Any online portrayal is only that—a portrayal.
Our feelings rely on the real thing. The people who get
their esteem from posting online constantly need the
daily esteem boost because they know the image isn’t real
as well. They know they’re being praised for an illusion
and that their real lives don’t live up to the illusion. While
we can trick others, we cannot trick ourselves.
So, how do we build up real esteem? How do we gain
quality recognition? How do we know that our strength
and capability are being recognised? We gain this through
our visible accomplishments and recognition that
others see a strong character in us. In a very competitive
and visible world, gaining esteem through visible
accomplishments isn’t so easy. On the day you receive
your degree, thousands of others receive one as well.
While you might be in the top 10 in your field, awards
and rewards usually only go to the very top. In high
school, another student nearly had a breakdown because
I was winning awards without putting in effort, while all
his efforts were going unnoticed and unrewarded. It’s
frustrating when we try so hard and nobody seems to
notice.
In our employment, we can get that sense of
accomplishment through promotions and being given
extra responsibilities, though not all jobs allow for that
so easily. Oftentimes a promotion requires as much
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politicking as it does effort and capability, but many may
not like to take that route. Professionally, there is no set
answer or strategy to receiving visible accomplishments
because I have seen, myself, how blind and political the
professional world can be. The best you can do is to learn
and understand the system you are in and seek to make
yourself into the person who succeeds in that system.
The professional world isn’t the only place where we can
gain esteem. We often have a general idea of what others
think of us, whether we’re a hanger-on, or somebody
people don’t easily trust, or somebody that others feel
they can trust and would benefit from your help if they
need it. We feel good when people around us recognise
our strength and capability and ask us to put those traits
to use.
As a teacher, I have a constant feedback loop for esteem.
I know whether students see me as somebody they can
count on or not. When a student stops working in my
class, they feel I’m not working for them, or that my
approval of them doesn’t matter because they don’t
respect me. However, when they come to me for help, or
start emulating me, I know they respect and appreciate
me and see me as somebody they would like to become.
The feeling when somebody sees you as the model for
who they want to be as a person is powerful. There’s
very little room for promotion as a teacher, so we must
look to our students and peers for recognition.Character
Building and Recognition
So, how do we become the person who others appreciate?
First, we need to be trustworthy. It’s a horrible feeling to
not be trusted or to not be able to trust somebody else.
And, trust is built over a lifetime, but it can all be lost in
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a moment or two. Maybe you’re thinking that it’s hard to
be self-interested and trustworthy and dependable at the
same time. I’m not going to tell you that you should be
trustworthy because it’s the right thing to do; that’s more
disillusion. We need esteem and we need positive social
relationships, so your best interest is in being dependable.
There’s a difference, of course, between self-sacrifice and
being trustworthy. If you have a very valid reason for not
living up to your word, and you’re honest about it, people
can understand that. Anybody who doesn’t understand
that is the untrustworthy one because you can’t count on
them to consider your best interests either.
One of the major factors in being trustworthy is being
honest. Honesty is very rare in the world. We often lie to
people either to save their feelings or our own. During
my first romantic relationship—a three-year relationship
I haven’t mentioned yet—I lied a lot. Even worse, I got
away with it all. Not only was I lying to her, but I was
lying to myself, and this is why the relationship lasted
three years, wasting her time as well as my own. Day to
day, we had no problems, we didn’t fight, we enjoyed
each other’s company, and I became a part of her family,
so it was very difficult to break up. There was no moment
that arose to cause the breakup to happen.
The major problem for me was just that I wasn’t ready
for, and didn’t want to be in, a serious relationship at
that point in my life. Eventually, I couldn’t handle all the
lying, and she certainly didn’t deserve it, so I built up the
courage and took advantage of a small event to break up.
Unfortunately, to save her feelings, as well as my own,
I used a lie to break us up, as well. The result was that
she was devastated. From her perspective, everything
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seemed to be going well and then, out of nowhere, we
were over. She was missing a lot of information to enable
my actions to make sense, and I never gave her that. So,
she would have been plagued by those broken thought
loops without ever gaining any resolution.
I was deeply ashamed of myself, but I couldn’t summon
the courage to tell the truth. This experience has affected
me ever since, but most acutely over the next few years.
Not wanting to hurt anybody like I had hurt my first, I
decided I would put a time limit on each relationship. If,
after two weeks, she wasn’t the love of my life and I felt
I would give up everything for her, I would end it. They
might think I’m a jerk, but they wouldn’t be devastated.
However, I didn’t tell any of the women this. So, just
about every two or three weeks for the next couple years,
I had a breakup.
I still hadn’t developed the courage to be honest with
anybody. So, I’d try one lie with one woman, and that
would end horribly, so the next time I would try a
different lie, and so on. I have likely broken up with
women in more ways than anybody else ever has. And, I
can guarantee you, that any breakup that ends with a lie
is a bad breakup for both of you.
I eventually reached a point where I was so ashamed of
who I was and the wreckage I was leaving behind that
I vowed to always be honest, to a fault, even. I would
say to women, when first asking them to go on our first
date, something like, Just so you know, I’m not looking for
anything serious and I don’t know if I’ll be up for two days,
two weeks or two months, but if you’re cool with that, we
can continue, and if not, I understand. Whenever I said
this, I was first met with shock and a little disappointment,
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but usually acceptance as well. The truth had set us free!
The relationships stopped ending and there were no
more breakups because there were no more hopes or
expectations of being in a relationship at all. We would
just stay friends and sex happened or it didn’t. Don’t
get me wrong, as some women accepted the situation
hoping they would change my mind, but on my new path
of honesty, I made sure to convince everybody with the
truth that change wasn’t going to happen. Honesty led to
much healthier relationships and higher esteem.
During that shameful period of my life, amongst women
and even some of my friends, I wasn’t well respected. I
wasn’t lying to my friends, but they saw the wreckage I
was leaving behind me. I wasn’t seen as a philosopher
trying to understand myself and the world through all
of those experiences. I was just seen as a manwhore. So,
to gain the esteem of others, we have to be regularly seen
as acting with honor and integrity. It’s not enough to be
honorable most of the time because if you’re dishonorable
some of the time, people assume that’s your real character
and your honorability is an act. You need courage and
commitment to be honest and to have integrity, and then
you’ll reap many rewards from it.
Another benefit to committing to honesty is being
forced to face failures and shortcomings. Judgment from
ourselves as well as others causes us distress, and distress
makes us want to adapt to overcome it. When we only
allow others to see us as we want them to see us and not
as we are, their judgment of us is misguided and does not
draw attention to those aspects we feel ashamed enough
of to lie about. By being honest and forthright, we are
judged as we are, and if that causes us shame, we clearly
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have reason to develop past it. As long as we maintain
the lie, we feel less pressure to change. Although we’re
saving ourselves from judgment, we clearly still feel
shame, otherwise we would not be lying, so instead of
changing ourselves to get past the public shame, we carry
personal shame as well as the weight of the lie. By making
our transgressions visible, we allow others to hold us
accountable to our desired change. A commitment to
honesty will then affect future decisions, preventing us
from doing things that might bring us shame, increasing
our esteem.
Returning to our framework, we can expand our
functionings by doing more and more things to make us
feel stronger, more capable and better about ourselves
and, at the same time, get us recognised as good people.
This allows us to develop an independent capability to
satisfy our esteem needs, freeing us from the need to
worry about how people think about us. We spend much
of our lives seeking the approval of others and worrying
that we’re not the person we wish we could be. If we start
working on it, little by little, we will become that person
and we’ll be free to focus on other parts of our lives.
I want to add here the importance of building capabilities
rather than simply having somebody respect us. The
people around us are constantly changing. People move
into and out of our lives, and we do the same to the
lives of others. If you’ve never left your hometown, you
may not realise this so much. But as we constantly meet
new people and enter into new groups, we feel the need
to prove ourselves all over again. We have our status
symbols to give people an idea of who we are, such as
our education level, how much money we have, what
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our profession is, and who our partner is, and while that
will help to give a first impression to somebody, the only
constant is your personal character. If you’re shy, nervous,
or arrogant, people won’t recognise strength, while if
you’re assertive and confident they will. And not just
acting confident and assertive, but the real thing gained
from accomplishments and recognition from repeated
successes and displays of a strong character. Additionally,
being accepted by multiple groups will go a long way
towards building your self-esteem.
I said in the section on safety needs that I would elucidate
why I’m able to share all of my insecurities with strangers
across the world. By developing myself into somebody
who is strong and capable and who is repeatedly
recognised as such, I have reason to feel good about
who I have become. All of my past transgressions and
the lessons I’ve learned from them have contributed to
making me into that person. While you may not approve
of the things I’ve done and the ways I’ve thought in the
past, they were essential to me learning the lessons I have,
as acutely as I have.
One of the benefits of building quality self-esteem is that
we become less vulnerable. Does this mean I don’t care
what others think? No. I’ve simply become less dependent
and less requiring of approval from each and every
person. Now, I hope that by sharing my transgressions,
others will be less obliged to commit them themselves,
or will understand that their own are a part of their
development as well. Finally, since sharing vulnerability
can be contagious, I hope that by sharing you will lower
your shields and open yourself while reading this so that
you may more honestly examine yourself.
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 Lesson VI
Self-Actualisation and Purpose

Maslow saw self-actualisation (SA) as becoming all that

one could become—realising one’s true potential. That,
of course, is very vague. How do I know all that I can
become? How do I know my true potential? I imagine that
if you ever reached a point in your life in which you’ve
realised you’ve become all you can become, that day
would mark a very sad occasion because the implication
is that you can’t become more; in other words, your
becoming is over. Maslow saw SA as something you’d only
reach after mastering all of your other needs or, within
my framework, developing the independent capability to
satisfy all of your needs. The idea is that every moment of
every day we are driven to satisfy needs, so it’s only after
we satisfy those needs that we’re no longer being pulled
by this need or that insecurity and can see what is left—
who we really are underneath it all.

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The Need for Purpose
Now, while I largely agree with that, I don’t believe that
we can’t experience SA needs until we’ve mastered all
other needs, and this is why I’ve likened SA to Nietzsche’s
master drive: the will to power. I see SA as the primary
drive, the guiding principle, and the reason why we
undertake all other development. SA is your need for
purpose above the satisfaction of needs. Our purpose
will likely change as we go through development because
it’s difficult to discern between a true purpose and the
beckoning of another need. As we silence our other needs,
our purpose will become clearer, but it is still there and
necessary throughout development.
Without purpose, without a guiding principle, there is no
reason to develop ourselves; in fact, there’s no reason to
get out of bed in the morning. We could go through our
lives distracting ourselves until death comes along and
puts us out of our misery. There would be no reason to
attend to climate change because we’ll be delivered from
life before the worst comes anyway.
When we’re at an early stage of personal development, our
days, months, and years are occupied with the satisfaction
of needs. We’re worried about our health and fitness, the
bills, our careers, our friends and partners, and what
people think about us. When we need a break from the
demands of life, and thinking itself, we distract ourselves
with music, TV, sports, and substance use. When we’ve
reached a point in our lives where we’ve mastered our
needs and their maintenance and no longer need to seek
the comfort of distraction, we’re left with a big, gaping
vacuum. You’ve done everything you’ve felt the need to
do, so now what? This is the need for purpose.
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Discovering Purpose
However, as we pass through life learning to master
the capabilities to satisfy our needs, the passage isn’t all
mechanical or neutral. We become somebody along the
way. When we increase our functionings to satisfy all
of our needs, we weed out the functionings we like and
dislike, and we start to see trends about who we are.
I’ve done a lot of different things in my life, and I’ve done
them all over the world. I’ve also taught every subject
in high school. While I can do well at anything I apply
myself to, there are clear affinities. I’ve taught business
and economics, though I have no interest in money
matters other than what I need to live. I’ve taught calculus,
physics, and other sciences, but I have zero interest in
them, except those that apply to the practical use of the
body. I’m not interested in going to space, except to
experience a short trip. I’m certainly not interested in
going to Mars. There’s absolutely nothing on Mars that
can beat swimming in the ocean, fresh air, trees and
flowers, rain and snow, and a large variety of people. If
we don’t figure out humanity and development on Earth,
then Mars will just be another planet for us to destroy.
All my life, I’ve been preoccupied with the human
experience: our emotions and motivations, what we feel,
what we do, and why we do it. At one point, I thought
I wanted to be a clinical psychologist, but to be honest,
knowing that for many psychological issues there are
no solutions would be disheartening. In fact, many
people who become psychologists really only wanted to
understand themselves and the people around them, but
then, once educated, had to make a career out of it.

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At another point I wanted to start an NGO, but I’ve
come to learn that helping people on the ground is really
complicated, and NGOs often do more harm than good.
I also need to be flexible so that I can continue to seek
new experiences and learn more and more. But when you
start an NGO to help somebody, giving them hope, and
then take off later and dashing that hope, never to have
attempted to help them at all would have been better.
As a teacher of the humanities, however, I get to lead,
inspire, and introduce my students to life and the world.
Teaching has been a great experience, and I have learned
much from it. However, I don’t know how long I can teach,
as eventually teaching will become too repetitive for me.
I thought I might want to open my own school so I could
have a greater effect on education, but my experience as
a school Principal revealed that administration doesn’t
interest me.
So for now, I’m writing this book, which has been very
fulfilling, but afterwards I don’t know exactly what I’ll
do. Self-actualisation isn’t the need to have a specific
career, it’s the need to have a life purpose. I’m a leader,
learner, mentor, and teacher. I’m not an administrator,
politician, or corporate employee. While I may not know
what career I’ll have, I’ll be leading, learning, mentoring,
and teaching in all I do. As Confucius said, I never grow
weary of learning and I never get tired of teaching others.
That’s who I’ve always been, whether I was a farmer,
pilot, backpacking bum, manwhore, or actual student
and teacher.

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Purpose Without Religion
One of the largest problems in the world, though probably
more so in the West, is that many people have difficulty
in finding purpose. Religion often serves as a purpose for
many, but with declining religion most have found nothing
to replace it. However, I don’t see replacing the purpose
previously supplied by religion with that of personal
development as that much of a stretch. I’ve studied the
religions of the world while I travelled and learned that if
I paid attention to the actual message, weeding out what
was added by the institutions managing the religion, then
the common thread through all of them is the search for
enlightenment through empowerment. The idea is for
you to become a good person, to become Christ-like, to
become like the Buddha, and not simply obey rules and
act like good people. If you learn to master your needs, so
your purpose is driving you and not your bodily needs,
you won’t need or want to break the rules of religion. So,
a life of personal development complements religious life
or can replace religion among the non-believers.
The Search for Purpose
So, how do you find your purpose beyond development?
When you master your needs, you won’t receive a letter
in the mail telling you which purpose you’ve won. Many
people who join the yoga community find it changes
their lives, so they feel that yoga is their life’s purpose
and they have to share it with everyone. However, while
this feeling may actually be true for some if they are also
learners/teachers to their core, yoga provides a method
of development rather than a purpose in itself. Some
may also say it provides the purpose of attaining
enlightenment, but enlightenment is one of those things
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that the more you try to get it, the harder it will be to
get. While my experience with yoga has been positive,
I’ve refrained from drinking the Kool-Aid and have
incorporated yoga into my life as a contributor to my
development and not as my saving grace.
As I said before, development requires a level of
mindfulness, of awareness. I’ve had many people tell me
that they have no idea who they are or what they want to
be. The key is to look for the common thread:
• What do you find yourself Googling in your free time?
• Which conversations do you find fascinating and why
• Who do you admire and why?
• What kind of movies and books do you like and why?
Picture yourself in many different kinds of careers,
trying to be as realistic as possible, and try to gauge your
feelings towards each one and why you like or dislike it.
As I said, I like to understand the body and mind, but not
to handle old naked people or work in a field with very
slow progress. The idea is not to pick the career suited
for you but to find out who you are. Eventually you will
find the answer was in front of you all along. When I was
young, I had a passion for learning, and I liked helping
classmates, but I never would have considered being a
teacher, and now I can’t think of anything else I’d rather
do.
The Benefits of Purpose
Now, what’s the benefit of knowing your purpose? Well,
without purpose, your other drives are competing for your
attention, so your life is chaos as you’re pulled in different
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directions. You’re constantly putting out fires and dealing
with drama. If you do manage to master your needs and
still don’t have purpose, then life is extremely boring. You
start looking for things to fill the empty spaces in your life
but nothing works. You see others interested in this or that
and figure you’ll get involved too, but it’s not resonating
with you as it is with them. There’s a feeling that you want
to do something that matters but nothing matters. The
danger when we reach this point is that it can cause us to
not care about need satisfaction anymore. Why bother?
Mastering your needs doesn’t make them disappear,
mastery just means you can satisfy these needs without
much effort. So, when you lose the will to maintain, your
life will start to fall apart until your temporary purpose
becomes setting your needs in order again. But, once you
do, you’ll return to the vacuum of nothingness and just
repeat the cycle of life flowing between order and chaos.
When you get to this listless phase of development, life
just isn’t as beautiful; everything is a shade of grey.
When you have purpose and have mastered your needs,
however, life has meaning and everything has its place.
You get to see beauty all around you and you’re more
creative. With your mind freed from the chaos of your
needs, it’s free to devote its resources to your purpose.
Having gained the habit and ability to master yourself, you
now set towards mastering your purpose. Furthermore,
the satisfaction of your needs aligns with your purpose.
With my purposes of learning and teaching, being a
teacher allows me to satisfy almost all of my needs in
one place. The respect of my students and peers satisfies
my esteem needs; the relationships I form with students
and other teachers satisfy most of my social needs;
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international schools are very safe places; my salary
allows me to satisfy my resource needs; and educating
and being surrounded by other educators allows me to
fulfill my purpose of teaching and learning. Furthermore,
to be a teacher is to be a role model, so my diet, exercise,
and lifestyle choices align with that role.
When people who haven’t mastered their needs take on
supportive roles, such as starting an NGO, the endeavours
end up becoming self-serving and unenlightened entities
because the founders need money and esteem. But, when
your needs are mastered, your efforts give more and
demand less. Imagine playing music to create and not
to get attention or money. Imagine trying to push your
physical limits without caring how many likes you get on
Instagram or if it will get you a date. Imagine devoting
your life to understanding the cosmos or the atom to
change humanity’s understanding of the universe and
our place within it. Imagine curing cancer and sharing
it with the world instead of the highest bidder. These are
examples of fulfilling your true potential.
Your purpose doesn’t have to be anything grand or world-
changing and, instead, might be to be a good member
of society, a good Christian, a good friend or partner, a
good parent, or a good employee. Your purpose might
be peace and harmony or to save lives or to lead and
represent your people in government. Other possibilities
might be to fight wars so that others don’t have to or
to right the wrongs you’ve committed in the past. Or it
might be to establish a legacy for yourself. Whatever it is,
having a purpose will give your life meaning and a reason
to master yourself and keep moving forward and getting
all that you can out of life.
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Anarchy as Purpose?
The examples I’ve given here are all sunshine and
rainbows, while you might be thinking your vision of
freedom is to see anarchy and watch the world burn. I can
assure you that nobody wants actual anarchy. You might
want to experience anarchy for a short while, as I said
everybody seeks to explore and embrace chaos for a while
to break the serenity of ontological security, but nobody
wants pure anarchy all the time. Anarchy is fear, and fear
is crippling. Societies exist to reduce fear and insecurity
and to make life predictable. Society is inevitable. Even
if anarchy comes about, a new society would rise to
reduce the insecurity. Ad hoc governments and police
forces would rise out of mutual interest. Currency and
banking would return. Society would return as it did
before, though it does flow in cycles, as there will always
be the need to embrace chaos for a while during periods
of security.
This desire for destruction often stems from traumas and
unmet social and esteem needs. When we learn to satisfy
all of our needs and come to terms with our traumas,
selfishness and spite disappear. We manipulate, use,
and hurt others to satisfy selfish needs, but when we’ve
learned to master our needs, we don’t have to continue
manipulating, using, or hurting others. Our motivation
stems from our needs, so our motivation pushes us in
other directions.
Returning to our framework, our functionings are
the way we perform and find our purpose. In my case,
expanding my functionings would be to find more ways to
learn and teach. This will, in turn, enhance my capability
to satisfy my need for purpose or SA. This enhanced
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capability will free me to spend my energies on perfecting
my purpose thus becoming a better student and teacher.
Transcendence
Later in Maslow’s life, he also spoke of transcendence,
a kind of enlightenment, in which we go beyond needs.
I envision that in this phase we have mastered all needs
so that they are not driving us anymore. Even the need
for SA is a powerful drive. But once we feel that we’ve
exhausted our creative energies and have done all we can
or want to do along our purpose, we’ll be content to live
out our lives free of chaotic desire. Silence will be blissful
and uninterrupted by pangs of need. We’ll even come to
look at our purpose-driven lives as ultimately foolish and
meaningless. We won’t fear death or long for it. We’ll see
beauty everywhere. We’ll be happy. We’ll love.

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 PART II

A RE-EDUCATION
IN FREEDOM, LOVE,
AND HAPPINESS
 Lesson VII
Re-Education

We must begin our re-education in freedom, love and

happiness starting with the words themselves. What do
these words mean? For a re-education, it is important
that we don’t limit ourselves to dictionaries, as they
are part of the problem. Dictionaries came after the
words. They were made by scanning literature and
looking for words and their uses, so they’re not the final
authority on the meaning of words—the original intent
is. We must unlearn what we’ve been taught and learn
anew by rediscovering original intent. Being given an
interpretation of a concept is the same as being given a
pre-written story for life.
What’s in a Word?
Many of the academics who study the structure of
languages say it is natural and beneficial that languages
change and adapt over time to reflect the evolving ways
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of thinking and interacting between others and the world.
I can’t completely agree, because while language is a
construct, and thus able to be reconstructed, some words
represent things that are pre-language. The word nation
for example, is a construct, an idea that doesn’t exist in
nature and it didn’t exist in our minds until the idea was
created and the language developed to represent it. We
cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch a nation. However,
the word nation and its corresponding definition are
extremely important. Nation is a concept that affects
everybody. It comes with benefits and responsibilities,
and puts people in groups while separating them from
others. But it is possible that the word nation might take
on a new meaning over hundreds of years, representing
the shifting sentiments of society, and that would be
perfectly acceptable as whatever was lost in the meaning-
shift might have been for the better.
Mixed Emotions
Fear, however, is real and has existed in humans and other
animals long before language came along to represent it.
We can see it in others and feel it in ourselves. Now, I
don’t know what thought was like before the advent of
language, but now we have come to think in terms of
words. When we feel something, we associate a word
with it and then we address it based on what we know
about the word. When we feel hunger, we seek food.
When we feel tired, we seek rest or caffeine. When we feel
fear, we seek safety. The human body has a very advanced
signalling mechanism to let us know of many problems
and conditions for us to address, and I doubt we have
come close to assigning words or understanding to all of
the signals we receive. This is unfortunate because the
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body only sends signals so that we can act to address
them. For those operations in the body that are addressed
automatically, we often don’t receive signals. Yet we still
receive signals and have no idea what to do about them.
So, if the word fear was appropriated over time and came
to mean something else, when we felt that very strong
feeling, we wouldn’t understand what it was or how
to deal with it. I know this might seem unimaginable
because fear is so acute that it can’t be mistaken, but it’s
just an example, and a relevant one because we often
have strong feelings that we don’t understand and can’t
address because we don’t have or know the words for
them.
Mixed Messages
Our understanding of words and concepts is extremely
important. If I have some kind of a feeling that I’m not
free, I demand freedom, but if the person I’m demanding
it from has a different idea of freedom, whatever they
give me will likely not take my ill feelings away. If I can’t
explain my lack of freedom or what my freedom should
look like, nobody can read my mind and provide it for me.
So, when you have thousands of protestors demanding
freedom, with people on both sides of the conflict having
different ideas of what freedom is, most people will leave
unsatisfied, even if the powers that be were willing to
acquiesce.
As an example, think of a teenager with a curfew who
feels that her parents control her too much. In a fit of
frustration, she demands that her parents give her more
freedom. Her parents, seeing that their daughter is clearly
very upset with their rules, extend her curfew by one hour.
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The daughter, however, sees this as the relaxation of a
constraint, but a constraint nonetheless, and she does not
feel free. While this is a simple example with only three
people involved, allowing for further discussion, when it
comes to large mixed groups requesting freedoms, it isn’t
easy for everybody to voice their own desires.
While differing understandings of concepts add flavor
to the world, it helps to have a common ground and
not one decreed from on high, but one with a logical,
rational basis. Now, anytime I propose anything logical
or rational about humanity, some artists start throwing
their hands up, saying that life isn’t logical or rational.
I have to disagree and assert it almost certainly is.
Emotions and feelings, even the most extreme and
apparently misplaced, are absolutelyrationalandlogical,
andifyoubelievethey’renot, it’s only because you haven’t
learned to understand them yet. Psychology wouldn’t
exist as a science if it were otherwise. Furthermore, when
you understand why a sunset looks as it does, it doesn’t
make it any less beautiful. Understanding and knowledge
augment power, and power is essential to personal growth
and development.
Taking a Stand
Now, you can fight society and the powers that be on
every word in the language to force those common
grounds, such as the interpretation of cat for example.
But I won’t be joining you because I don’t care. I don’t
believe my life can or will change if the word cat takes on
a slightly different meaning, and if my life does somehow
change because of it, I’d adapt and move on without a
second thought.

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I do, however, care when words that affect the entire
meaning of our lives are appropriated, reassigned, and
thrown around in so many ways that most people have
no idea what they’re looking for in life. When lost and
confused, people have almost no choice but to follow
society’s story, no matter how much it hurts them to do
so. Chasing money will not necessarily lead to power,
freedom, or happiness; chasing romance will not
necessarily lead to love; and getting older does not mean
you are developing. Thus, these crucial words that are
not well understood, if not lost completely, are power,
development, freedom, love and happiness.

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 Lesson VIII
Freedom

While my theory of human development shows how we

can expand our freedoms by freeing ourselves from the
control of our drives, and freeing us to do other things,
freedom is most often used in other contexts. So, it’s
important that we have a more thorough understanding
of freedom.
What does freedom mean? Can anybody really be free?
Was I free when I left the military, giving up my salary
and health and dental benefits? Did my ex-girlfriend
set me free when she broke up with me? Are there
freedoms besides those we gain from our development?
To understand freedom, we have to understand our
constraints and our relationships with them.

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The Land of the Free
The United States of America calls itself the Land of the
Free, as if other lands aren’t of the free. So, are Americans
the only free people in the world? If so, what sets them
apart? Well, the US has one of the highest per capita
incomes in the world, though not the highest, and money
increases freedom, right? The US is much more capitalistic
than most countries in the world, making it possible to
go from working out of your garage to being one of the
richest people in the world almost overnight. Americans
also have the most advanced healthcare system in the
world for those who can afford to use it, and they have
some of the most prestigious educational institutions in
the world for those who can afford to attend them.
As for freedom of speech, Americans are free to say
whatever they want, as loudly as they want, whether it’s
true or false, based on fact or fiction, logic or whimsy,
whether it promotes violence and bigotry, or mollification.
If it can be said, Americans can say it. And, the guns! Let’s
not forget about the guns. Who else can legally have an
arsenal in their basement other than Americans? So, a
high average income, opportunities, potential access to
high-quality healthcare and education, the permission to
say anything under the sun, and guns defines freedom,
right?
But the average income is just that, an average, raised
higher by the mega-rich millionaires and billionaires.
This consolidation of wealth hides how many people live
in poverty in America without access to opportunities,
quality education or healthcare, and a platform from
which to speak. If they have a gun, it’s almost a necessity
for survival rather than a privilege.
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High crime in the country’s cities means there are streets
and neighbourhoods where most outsiders will not go.
When considering moving to study at the University of
Chicago, my friend who’d lived there spoke of a Walmart
that was off-limits because the neighbourhood was
too dangerous. He also said some of the best soul food
restaurants were in areas of the city I shouldn’t go. I’ve
lived and travelled all over the world, and there aren’t
many countries I’ve been in where parts of a city are off-
limits to me, though they certainly do exist.
So, some Americans certainly are freer than others,
though many have very little freedom. I only use America
as my example because it’s the most visible country in the
world thanks to global entertainment trends and social
media. I can find examples of the illusions of freedom in
every country. But how can we say some are freer than
others? What is freedom? Can everybody be free?
The Fallacy of Being Free
Spoiler alert: nobody is free. Every human being is
bound in all directions. Maybe the Buddha was free for a
moment before dematerialising, or after, who knows. But
the human experience is to be bounded by our bodies
and the laws of nature, the conventions and institutions
of our cultures and societies, as well as our knowledge
and fears. I cannot lift a car over my head. I can’t survive
with only water and good vibrations. I cannot teleport
or fly unaided. I can’t go around killing people without
repercussions. In Canada, I can’t get away without
saying thank you without repercussions. I can’t have
a conversation in Finnish. I cannot, at this moment,
build a spaceship and fly to another galaxy. And I cannot
consciously, knowingly, voluntarily, pick up a large cave
spider and eat it. I’m not free. I’m bound. I have limits.
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Freedom Reigns in Free Domains
The important part of the word freedom is the suffix -dom.
A king is not a king everywhere. Instead, he is limited to
a specific domain: a kingdom. A king could expand his
kingdom, expand his domain, and increase his powers,
but he doesn’t rule outside of these boundaries. So, like
a kingdom that limits a king’s rule, your freedom is the
domain in which you are free.
While not everybody gets a kingdom, everybody does
have freedom. The problem, however, is that some people
have a broader freedom, or more freedom, than others.
Why? How?
The mega-rich have more power than poorer people.
Their wealth and influence give them more economic
power, sometimes political power, and access to nearly
every experience humanity has to offer. All doors are
open. Even if their wealth can’t buy love or happiness, it
buys opportunity and access to resources to enable them
to try and discover them. So, the mega-rich are freer than
the poor.
Laws and political systems help to determine our domains
of freedom. Typically, the law is supposed to create an
equal domain of freedom for all. While class inequality
will always exist, at least everybody can be equal under
the law. However, this is not always the case. In diverse
countries, it is often the case that the ruling political
powers balance the law in favour of their own people.
The current Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the
world is seeking to address this institutionalised racism
and discrimination in which not all are equal under the
law, whether the law says so or not. In the West, white
people are freer than other people.
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The Relativity of Freedom
Most people feel their system of laws, as long as it hasn’t
changed recently, is free and fair, and often criticise
other countries for their systems of laws. We’ve become
accustomed to our own constraints. We don’t rail against
gravity for holding us down as we’ve gotten used to it. It is
the same for our legal and societal bindings. If a Muslim
woman who has been accustomed to wearing a niqab her
entire life travels to France where it is illegal to cover the
face, she will feel that France is a less free country than
her own. Likewise, most Western people would think
Saudi Arabia allows very few freedoms because of its ban
on alcohol, strict gender roles, and the forced covering of
female heads, among other rules. However, many Saudi
Arabians likely wouldn’t want it any other way.
While the US considers itself the morality police of the
world, the rest of the world finds American gun laws to
be so tragic they are laughable. Yet, even among the mass
shootings and rampant gun violence, many Americans
still feel they should legally be allowed to have guns. The
issue is changing something most people are accustomed
to doing. While losing the freedom to own guns would
likely increase the freedom to walk the streets without
fear, people prefer what they know: political freedoms are
relative.
Rebellion as Freedom
The career criminal who lives outside the law might seem
freer than those dutifully following the rules, but the
freedoms the criminals gain from their criminality are
often offset by the opportunities they lose by not being
an upstanding member of society. Society has its own
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rules, and they can be just as limiting as the legal ones;
in fact, most legal rules are derived from societal rules.
Our behaviors, identities, and morality are molded by
the rules of our societies.
On a similar note, people who like to rebel against society
claim that they’re doing so out of a desire for freedom.
But, as I’m sure everybody has seen, the visible rebel
is often shunned by society, meaning he has less access
to all the opportunities and other things he needs. To
increase our freedom, we need to increase our access
and opportunities. While I’m not saying that everybody
should be a follower, it is in everybody’s best interest to
be able to play the role society expects of them.
The more freedom you develop, the more you can diverge
from the appearance of the norm and still be accepted
by society. The famous figures of rebellion we all know
are loved and accepted by society but it’s only because
they built their freedom in ways society approved of,
even though they later turned it against society. Martin
Luther King Jr. was much more influential than Malcom
X, because MLK Jr. spoke within American society,
appealing to Americans as humans, rather than pitting
the black community against the white, creating further
division.
We can only change society from within. People don’t
listen to the cries for change from people outside of their
society. The Black Lives Matter movement isn’t listening
to racists, and vice versa. Feminists are not listening to
non-feminist men, and vice versa. Israel is not listening
to Iran, and vice versa. China is not listening to America,
and vice versa. If you want to influence a society, you first
have to be accepted as a member of it. The rebel sitting
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alone in her basement raging against the machine will
not be expanding her freedoms or changing society.
Society as Freedom Police
Cultures and societies have rules. For example, in every
culture, there are lies, but they’re often different in
different cultures. In Canada and the US, you cannot,
in good manners, comment negatively on somebody’s
appearance, so everybody is beautiful and nobody is fat.
However, if somebody is performing badly at something,
it is almost a duty for others to point out their mistakes. In
China, on the other hand, appearances can’t be hidden, so
everybody is very blunt and honest about who is beautiful
and who is ugly and who is fat and who is thin. However,
when it comes to intelligence or ability, it is usually not
acceptable to publicly point out when somebody is doing
something wrong or appears unintelligent.
When you break society’s rules, you are punished
through reputational damage. First impressions are
important because they establish your reputation with
somebody new. If you are rude, base, cruel, violent,
arrogant, awkward, shy, etc., during your first meeting
with somebody, it will take a while to change their mind
and repair your reputation. Likewise, if you are charming
and polite, it will take many transgressions before your
reputation with them falls. Our reputations grant us
opportunities, be they romantic, social, economic, or
otherwise. Even when somebody likes a rebel, they still
expect that person to follow some certain rules of society.
More opportunities mean more freedoms. People who at
least appear to follow society’s rules are freer than people
who do not.

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Having spent nine of the past ten years outside of Canada,
in countries very different than Canada, I found that
there’s an extra level of freedom when you’re an obvious
foreigner. Russians, Chinese, Egyptians, and Peruvians,
for example, don’t expect me to follow most rules of their
society because they know I come from a very different
one. I’m simply an outsider, neither being rewarded nor
punished for my following of society’s rules. I try to be
respectful and fit in as much as I can, but I’ll always be an
outsider to the locals.
However, after eight years outside of Canada, I spent a year
studying in Toronto. After being immune to the pressures
of society for so long, it felt overwhelming to once again
be subject to societal rules. While I don’t identify as a
quintessential Canadian anymore, Canadians still see me
as one of them. The problem was not that the rules were
inconvenient, it was that they were constant, and now
obvious, expectations of behaviours, creating this ever-
present pressure. When you’ve only been in one society,
you don’t notice these pressures constantly molding you
into who they want you to be, and it was only through my
travels that I was able to see it.
Mastery as Freedom
When I say that it is in our best interests to learn to
play the role expected of us by society, I certainly don’t
mean that we should repress our feelings, emotions, or
opinions. We can, however, learn to express them suitably
for the situation at hand, or hold on to them until we’re
out of the situation. While this, again, may be construed
as conformity, we don’t express every thought and feeling
we have in every situation, anyway. You likely express
yourself more freely with close friends than you do with
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anybody else, so you’re already conforming to different
social situations, and, as I said, eventually you’ll be able
to be the same person in every situation.
Part of what makes us comfortable enough to be the same
in every situation is the mastery of our emotions. The
unfree person is ruled by emotions, while the free person
has mastered them. Mastery does not mean repression. In
fact, repression of emotions causes many more problems
and creates more limits on us. When we repress emotions,
we become afraid to show any emotions out of fear that
they will all pour out uncontrollably. The repression of
sexuality and our need for intimacy, for example, can lead
to sexual disorders and aggressive outpourings, resulting
in rapes and other sexual violence. I have met many people
around the world, both male and female, who prefer their
sex to have elements of violence, pain, and domination.
This is likely due to traumas or a repression of emotions
in their every day life, resulting in it being manifested
during the vulnerability and opening up during sex. Rest
assured, whatever feelings you’re having, others have
them, too, and there are professionals who are capable of
helping you determine causes and solutions.
Most people, and I really mean most, have had traumas
of some sort. People are bullied, abused, neglected,
abandoned, over-pressured, manipulated, and more,
regardless of class, race, gender, or sexuality. Every
trauma is relative. We cannot compare traumas and say
one person’s trauma is more important than another’s. If
they’ve had trauma, it’s important. Furthermore, every
trauma is personal and requires a personal solution, even
if it’s a shared trauma, like that experienced in war. Our
traumas place a great hold over our lives.
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I was 27 before I realised I had always been traumatised
during my childhood, after having been abandoned by
my mother, mistreated by my subsequent step-mother,
and generally neglected as though I was nothing more
than a machine. This caused me to greatly repress all of
my emotions, which often came pouring out while drunk.
The first step for me to get over this repression was to
acknowledge my anger and disappointment. Then I could
look at my tormentors and realise that they were people
thrust into situations they weren’t ready for. They had
their own problems and weren’t ready to deal with me
or my problems. To be honest, I don’t know that I would
have done much better if I had been thrust into such a
situation in my twenties, when I had my own unresolved
issues. I also realised that I was carrying around all this
pain, punishing nobody but myself, and if I continued to
carry it, I would still only be punishing myself.
These earth-shattering conclusions allowed me to
genuinely forgive them and to let them all go. It was a
nearly indescribable moment—like divine intervention.
A huge, involuntary shudder shook me as I relaxed for
the first time and let it all go. My entire view of the world
changed and my life would never be the same. To be free,
we all need to deal with our traumas.
Body and Mind, Competition or Contemplation?
We are limited by the abilities of our bodies; however,
some people, such as elite athletes and soldiers, have
learned to push past preconceived limits, giving them
access to ways of life that unhealthy and unfit people
don’t have. Parkour athletes, for example, who can
quickly traverse the most daunting obstacles using just
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their physical ability, are clearly able to travel and do
things that most others cannot.
Personally, I’ve gotten into sprint training several times
in my life, and while the actual speed isn’t important, just
learning how to push every fibre of your body towards a
singular purpose to discover new limits and then push
past them is an amazingly freeing experience. Not simply
showing an ability to run fast, but to gain control over
your body. While already running at, what you think is
your hardest, you can learn to send your awareness to
each part of your body, muscle by muscle, and ask for
more, and then receive it.
I was teaching health to grade 10 students one day, and
I gave them an assignment to choose five exercises and
tell me which body parts they were primarily working
for each one. This assignment was a buildup to them
developing the ability to design their own exercise
routines to get the specific results they wanted. I received
the most random answers. I had students tell me that
push-ups were working their legs because their legs felt
tight in keeping their body straight during the push-up.
That was just one example, but nobody in the class, not
the brightest or the most athletic, had any awareness of
their body at that point. I had been working out with
them for weeks, assuming they knew which muscles we
were exercising during squats/push-ups/ab-crunches,
etc. We all gained knowledge to bring forward after that
one. People who master their bodies are freer than those
who do not.

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Misunderstood Morality
Our morality limits our freedom. When we have
preconceived ideas of what is right or wrong, we
immediately close ourselves off to many potential
experiences and learning lessons. Many people will
never try something because they’re told it’s wrong. But
all the wisdom in all the world will never teach you how
wrong something is as much as the experience of doing it
and seeing just how wrong it is. The difference between
morality holding you back and you holding yourself back
is that when you do the latter, you know it’s in your best
interest and that you’re exerting power over your own life.
When we follow morality, we act like good people, but
when we learn what not to do, we become good people.
People with morals have to fight their temptations to
break them, leaving themselves in permanent distress,
but people who have learned morality cannot be tempted
at all.
There is, I believe, a misunderstanding about Nietzsche’s
views on morality. He says that everything is permitted,
but this doesn’t mean passion, chaos, and randomness
should reign supreme. His philosophy was deeply
concerned with the mastery over the self, so people
wouldn’t be ruled by their bodily and emotional drives.
Rape and murder, as acts of passion, reveal the rule of
the body over the conscious will. According to Nietzsche,
the primary goal of the will is power, but what is power
but to create change? His views on morality fit into a
much larger philosophy involving the perfection of
existence and in which art and beauty are paramount. All
is permitted doesn’t mean all should be done. As I said,
the person who learns to be “good”, while permitted to do
“bad”, doesn’t want to do “bad”.
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I put quotations around “good” and “bad” because without
an imposed morality, those distinctions disappear. There
is no good or bad; instead, there is context, cause, and
effect. If you have to kill to save your child, that situation
is much different than picking up a hitchhiker and
killing her out of some strange desire. The same act of
killing has completely different contexts, causes, and
effects. The developed persons who have gone beyond
imposed morality might not feel badly about killing to
save their child and would never have desires to kill a
person randomly because such an act doesn’t make sense,
doesn’t benefit them, and does have potentially disastrous
consequences. Highly developed people celebrate life and
don’t seek to diminish or destroy it.
Furthermore, we all have a morality, and even Nietzsche
said that he was more moral than others. The difference
between common conceptions of morality and one like
Nietzsche’s view is that common morality is imposed
upon us by others and requires acting and restraining,
while our own moralities are learned and become a part
of who we are. An imposed morality has power over us,
while our own developed morality gives us power over
morality. If we choose to decide our own morality, it is
fluid as we learn and adapt, and it is stronger because we
don’t have any temptation to fight it.
Fear vs Freedom
Another major constraint on our freedom is fear. I wasn’t
the typical shy kid, as I was tall and strong, the captain of
the high school basketball team and the top student, but
I was extremely shy. I talked to the most beautiful girls in
the school every day, but I never once flirted or asked any
of them out. I was scared to death at the thought. Even
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when I thought somebody probably liked me, I froze and
changed the subject. I remember a girl whose locker was
next to mine, and—no exaggeration—I asked her every
day for a month if she had a date for whatever ball was
coming up, and she said no and asked me the same and I
said no, and that was that. I couldn’t say those few extra
words, would you like to go with me? It was impossible.
My problem wasn’t in actually saying the words, which
would then have gotten stuck like a lump in my throat.
No, my brain wouldn’t send the signal to speak at all. High
school dating is like a rite of passage in our development
and my fear held me back.
In my opening story, I mentioned that one of the hardest
parts of changing my life was telling my father about my
plans. He wasn’t going to hit me or yell at me or anything
like that. I was just afraid that he would be disappointed
in me. Parental approval is a major source of our self-
esteem. I know of many people who are stuck living lives
they don’t like just because they’re afraid to disappoint
others and possibly themselves. The brave and the bold
are freer than the cowardly and meek.
As I said earlier, Erich Fromm in Fear of Freedom reveals
that people are afraid to be free. Living society’s story is
relatively easy. Even if you fail, you’ve got instructions all
around you for how to get back on your feet and soldier
on. Freedom doesn’t come with an instruction manual
(even though I’m kinda creating one here). As long as
you’re following me or anybody else, you’re not free, as
you’re just trading stories. Hippies aren’t free, they’re just
following their hippy story. Same with the yogis, hipsters,
goths, 420s, or any alternative society. They are all simply
trading in one pre-written story for a revised story. Being
free takes courage.
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In our current age of information overload, what’s hard
to know is what’s true and untrue and who we should
believe. The free person develops themself so that they
don’t need to follow others. And, until you become that
person, always try to look at multiple sides of the same
argument. Educate yourself. Don’t be a follower; find
your own truth rooted in your own experience, not just
from what you see online. Develop the courage to form
your own opinions and blaze your own trail.
Ever since I chose to forge my own path, I have had many
moments of insecurity. I essentially live my life from one
desired experience to the next, expecting that experience
to shed light on what I want my next experience to be.
For example, from studying a master’s of international
development I realised I wanted to go deeper into the
theory of development, so I then went into a master’s of
political theory.
As another example, I spent several years teaching
high school and perfecting the methods I used to
influence my students’ development, but I noticed that
other students in the school weren’t getting this kind
of motivated teaching. Since I couldn’t teach the whole
school, I decided I wanted to be a Principal just to have
the opportunity to affect the teachers to then affect all the
students. I took a pay cut and went to the small Chinese
city of Hengyang, where almost nobody spoke English,
just to have this opportunity, but then I learned I was too
distant from the students and had too little effect on them
and wanted to return to educating.
When you don’t have a long-term plan, it can often be
difficult to choose the next experience. It’s like in the
example I gave of the American roadmap. I know I’m
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building upon myself and making progress, so I’m
moving East, but if my current options are a North East
direction or a South East direction, taking one route might
lead me somewhere I don’t like and also put me further
away from my too-late-acknowledged desired location.
It might be that each of these directions represents me
choosing between prioritising my career or my social life,
with each direction severely affecting the other.
So, you can see the dilemma and the trade offs. Knowing
what I know now, would I go back to the pre-written story?
Absolutely not. While I have no idea what direction I’m
moving in at the moment, I’m constantly building and
developing and creating more opportunities for myself.
I’m gaining power over my life. But, it’s not easy, and I’ve
seen many people attempt it and run back to cling to the
story they know. Some people want to know beforehand
that there’ll be a happy ending.
I must also clarify that seeking freedom does not mean
you need to live a life like mine, one of travel and constant
change. We can gain freedoms internally without much
external change. You don’t have to quit your job or
abandon your families or friends to be free and gain
power over your life.
Another key point is that gaining power over your life
does not mean gaining power over those around you,
though it will certainly increase your power relative to
them. The majority of the freedom we have to gain is
from ourselves—our drives, emotions and self-imposed
limits. These freedoms allow us to experience love and
happiness like never before.

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 Lesson IX
Love

The word love is one of those all-powerful words that we

want our lives to be coloured with, but because it is so
elusive, we use the word love in all kinds of contexts in
which it doesn’t belong. So, one of our first requirements
for learning about love is unlearning what we know about
it.
Principles of Love
Before we can start proving that love is often used
incorrectly, we need to establish the principles on what
love can or cannot be; in other words, the limiting factors.
In my scouring of old sources, with most of them being
religious, and spanning all religions, love is a positive
force as a verb and something great and awesome as
an adjective. Since religions are the most dominant
influences on our cultures and societies, even if you

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identify as atheist or agnostic, religion is a reliable source
on the meaning of love. Other uses of love, such as the
modern uses, and even modern interpretations of ancient
Greek versions of love, have elements of selfishness and
negativity in them. Thus, if there is a spectrum of words
from positive to negative, I assert that the word love must
be at the most extreme positive end of the spectrum and
devoid of any negative connotations.
Another first principle of love is that it must endure.
Fleeting emotions are a consequence of the chaotic battle
of our individual needs. The only way love stays positive
is if it endures. You cannot say you love somebody one
moment, beat them the next, and then go back to saying
you love them afterwards. Well, you can certainly say it,
but it won’t be true. The abusive partner doesn’t know
love. And if you love somebody for a month, and then
something happens and changes your mind, clearly you
were only using them to serve a purpose, and that wasn’t
love.
We’re talking about love after outlining human
development because as long as we’re being directed by
the many needs of the self, love can’t be possible. Love
isn’t a need. Affection and intimacy are needs, both
giving and receiving, but because they’re needs, they’re
too temporary and occasion to whim to be as powerful
as love. Love can only be found in the vacuum, once
independent mastery of the needs takes place. But, once
it is found, it endures.
So, in our re-education in love, we have two first
principles. One, is that it is incorruptibly positive and
cannot be deemed negative in any way. Two is that love
must endure and cannot be subject to whim or fancy or
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changing emotions. While it is open to debate, this alone
can suffice as a definition of love for a free person who
seeks to understand the world. You can set about trying
to determine for yourself what is incorruptibly positive
and enduring. I actually recommend that you do take a
break here and think about it before proceeding. Think
about everything you consider to be love and look for
corruption and selfishness. The pure satisfaction of a
need is selfish, and acts that might seem altruistic are
ultimately for ourselves as we are self-interested.
In Love
Now is a good time to explain what it means to be in love
and show that it isn’t love either. I think most people have
felt what it’s like to be in love, even if they’ve never been
in a relationship.
Love has been described as butterflies in the stomach
by poets and songwriters over the years, instilling love
with the fiercest passions but also the most painful of
feelings. Picture Romeo and Juliet willingly dying for
their so-called love. Picture Bella in Twilight completely
consumed, essentially rolling around in agony, and
willing to risk her life repeatedly for love. While these
are, of course, dramatisations, the feeling of being in love
is extremely strong.
I’ve had the fortune, or I suppose, misfortune, to have
experienced being in love several times and can attest
to its strength and crippling severity. While I said I have
dated countless amazing women, I can count on one hand
how many times I’ve been in love. While the first was
the woman with whom I had the devastating breakup, I
never dated the others. The feeling of being in love is so
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rare and so strong that when it happens it cripples me
and I feel useless. Any of the characteristics that women
might find attractive in me disappear. When at once I was
confident, now I am self-conscious. When at once I was
casual, now I am cautious. My overwhelming desire not
to mess it up causes me to mess it up. The problem is that
I’m putting her on a pedestal.
But what is love? What is this overwhelming feeling of
being in love? Stop and think of the people closest to
you. What feelings do you have towards them? Feelings
we often have towards others are adoration, amusement,
arousal, attraction, curiosity, desire, envy, gratitude,
infatuation, inspiration, interest, jealousy, longing, lust,
nostalgia, passion, pride, sentimentality, shock, shyness,
surprise, sympathy, tenseness, trust, and wonder.
There are many others, of course, and I only wrote the
ones that might cause you to like somebody, but try to
pin these on the people around you. Not just one, but
as many that apply. For example, with one of your best
friends, you might feel adoration, amusement, gratitude,
nostalgia, sentimentality, sympathy, and trust. Having all
of these feelings at the same time towards another person
creates a strong connection. However, some of these
feelings are similar or related, and in this example, you
can picture a long friendship that is close and trusting,
with mutual care, and the other person is fun or funny.
When we find somebody hot or sexy, we’d usually have
the feelings of arousal, attraction, desire, longing, and
lust. Essentially, we just really want them and we can
recognise what our feelings are towards them.

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When we’re in love, however, the diversity and the
strength of our feelings are so that we can’t recognise it.
We desire and admire them but they also amuse us and
make us feel safe, and potentially a little reckless as well.
There’s usually an element of curiousity and wonder. In
fact, feeling like you’re in love can feel awesome, in the
true sense of the word. We put them on a pedestal and
we feel reverence mixed with fear and wonder. Because it
is so rare to have so many feelings creating this awesome
amalgamation, we assume it has to be love. Love has to
be powerful, and this feeling is powerful, so this feeling
must be love.
Chemical Love
While this overwhelming feeling is actually just a fusion
of feelings, this fusion becomes a feeling in and of itself,
and that feeling is the feeling of being in love. This
overwhelming feeling is accompanied by a neurochemical
high. Dopamine is released when we’re in the thrill of
the hunt, or the flirting and courtship phase; oxytocin is
released during intimate contact; and serotonin is released
when we’re accepted by people we’ve put on a pedestal.
If you’ve never heard the names of these neurochemicals
before, dopamine affects how we feel pleasure, and drugs
such as cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamines, MDMA
(ecstasy), and opioids stimulate a release of dopamine.
Oxytocin is responsible for social bonding, including
helping to form the powerful bond between mother and
child. Serotonin has many complex roles in the body,
including mood stabilisation, sexual desire, and feelings
of happiness and well-being, and too little serotonin can
result in feelings of depression. MDMA also causes large
amounts of serotonin to be released.
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So, the feeling of being in love is actually chemically
addictive. The problem with the mass output of these
neurochemicals is that it reduces our overall store of
them, leaving less to go around afterward, resulting in a
depressive hangover. This depression pushes us to seek
the high again. However, we don’t need to take drugs or
plan another romantic conquest to increase our levels of
dopamine and serotonin, as exercise and foods such as
eggs and nuts, among others, help to increase them. The
problem, though, is that many confuse the high of being
in love as being actual love. But since a chemical high
does not endure, and is most certainly corruptible, being
in love is certainly not love.
Love Changes?
Furthermore, since the feeling of being in love lessens
or mutates as relationships go on, it has allowed people
to say that love changes over time. But what is actually
changing is the individual feelings you have towards the
other person. Over time, lust and longing degrade, as do
wonder and reverence. So, we remove them from their
pedestal and we no longer have an awesome amalgamation;
the feeling of being in love has disappeared. However,
usually feelings of trust and mutual care increase as the
relationship settles and you become important, stable
parts of each other’s lives. But still, none of this is love.
Changing feelings represents a potential for corruptibility
and shows that those feelings don’t endure. As stable as
that relationship might become, as individual needs are
satisfied and motivations change, the relationship might
not suit the new goals of one or both of them. Being in
love does not endure, and thus it isn’t love.

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It’s also important to recognise that we can be in love with
friends and other people without sexual attraction. As
long as we can be overwhelmed with the number and
diversity of feelings we have towards another person, we
can be in love. This might confuse people and lead them
to think it’s love and that they should have a romantic
relationship with the person, but it doesn’t have to be the
case. While we would want that overwhelming feeling to
be satisfied or to subside, it will usually happen just from
spending more time with the person. You’ll likely still like
them but you’ll be less awestruck and can remove them
from a pedestal and feel less reverential towards them.
At this point I hope it’s becoming clear that love isn’t an
emotion at all. All emotions are subject to change and
all emotions are short lived, and further enhanced by
their opposite emotions. We feel even more cold if we’ve
recently been hot; more energised if recently tired; more
amused if recently bored; more joyful if recently sad. If
we could say that we feel more love when we’ve recently
felt hate, this would show the corruptibility of love as one
could seek more hate as a way to gain more love.
A Fine Line Between Love and Hate?
It has often been said that there’s a fine line between love
and hate. That couldn’t be further from the truth; there’s
a whole spectrum between love and hate. If love is at the
most positive end, hate is at the most negative. Hate seeks
the ruin and destruction of another. When there appears
to be a fine line between love and hate, it’s an illusion
created by the ego. In fact, that person you thought you
loved, you were actually close to hating all along because
you were seeking their destruction all along. When we
are jealous and controlling, we seek to take away their
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free will and to strip everything away from them, except
that which pleases us. They are no longer a living,
breathing person but an object for our consumption. We
limit their friendships, censor their conversations, and
manage their time. We think we love them because the
part of them that pleases us, really pleases us. But when
they finally see our manipulation and control of them,
and they no longer do what pleases us, and they leave us,
we cross that line and officially hate them.
While saying it like this sounds like it only applies to
extreme cases, it’s actually a description of almost every
young, inexperienced exclusive relationship, as well
as many older ones as well. Our insecurities from not
knowing exactly how the other person feels causes us
to want to control the relationship as much as possible
to prevent our partner from leaving. So, we limit their
lives to reduce their chances of finding somebody else
they’d want to be with. We want them to be available to
us whenever we want and need, so we try to strip away
their independence and make them dependent on us as
well. Stripping away somebody’s independence is an act
of destruction. Again, not everybody tries to control their
partner, but very many do.
Jealousy is extremely common, and in some areas of the
world it’s even expected. I’ve seen in many cultures around
the world, that if there’s no jealousy in the relationship,
they assume their partner doesn’t really love them. People
will actually test their partners to see if they get jealous,
and leave them if they don’t. However, jealousy is very
far from love, and even worse, it isn’t even about your
partner at all. If I’m dating a girl and she’s talking to guys,
I’m likely only going to feel jealous if she’s talking to guys
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that I feel threatened by, as if she may like him more than
me. My feelings of jealousy have almost nothing to do
with her, they’re mostly about me and him. Whether you
really want to keep that partner or not, even worse than
losing your partner is losing your partner to a competitor.
When we haven’t developed ourselves socially and
esteem-wise, our egos and insecurities can’t handle it.
Ancient Love
So, if hate is at one end of the spectrum, and hate seeks
the ruin and destruction of another, what then is love and
how do we love? Let’s build a case. To do that, we’ll look
at the five major religions of the world, the ancient Greek
philosophers, and Confucius, as these seven sources have
had the largest impact on societies around the world.
Any time you make a list, there is always a risk that the
order suggests the author’s allocation of importance or
favour. Not so here, as I will list them according to their
approximate place in time, with the youngest first.
Islam
Within Islam, love is all encompassing. People are
expected to love others as they would love themselves
and to love God and love as God loves, as well. God
loves the good, the pure, the righteous, the just, and the
trustworthy, and does not love the brazen, the corrupt,
the unbelievers, the oppressors, the wasteful, the proud,
the treacherous, or the evil. So, it might be said that love
has the characteristics that God loves and does not have
the characteristics that He does not love.

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Christianity
In the Bible, love is most commonly translated from agape,
and the Bible says, “God so loved the world that he gave
his only son” and that “Love is patient and kind; love is
not boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its
own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice
in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth. It bears all things,
believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends”. The Bible also says, “God is love”. In
his ministry, Jesus said the two greatest commandments
were to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and
strength, and to love one another as you love yourself.
Ancient Greeks
Depending on your source, the ancient Greeks had 3, 6,
or 8 types of love. I’ll go with five because the other three
are too contextual or irrelevant. The first is eros, which
is pure sexual passion. The second is philia, which is an
affectionate love between friends and equals without
sexual attraction. Third is ludus, which is essentially
being in love or the playful romance of young lovers.
Fourth is philautia, a healthy love of the self, with the
understanding that lovers only love others as much as
they love themselves. Fifth is agape, which is a selfless
love extended to all people.
Confucianism
The primary focus here is on harmony and how everybody
should fulfill their roles perfectly so that all is harmonious.
In a way, it suggests a love for all, in that everybody
carries out their duty to the benefit of all. But, at the same
time, it demands a sacrifice from all. Furthermore, as I
said earlier, Confucianism asserted that we become good
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people through acting our roles until we became them.
Since everybody knew this, that everybody was working
hard and struggling in their attempt to perform their role
so that they may grow into their role, the upholding of
harmony is a contribution to the development of each
individual. Perform your role to the best of your ability,
to make life easier on others, so that they may perform
their role to the best of their ability. So, it is a love yourself,
love all; love all, love yourself philosophy, with personal
development and societal harmony at its core. Confucius
also said to love, judge, cherish, wish for, and protect
others as you would yourself.
Buddhism
Buddhists say that love has four characteristics.
Loving kindness is caring and nurturing and free from
attachment. Furthermore, it isn’t directed at one person,
but at all people. It is a way of life. They also say that love
must entail compassion, not just for others but ourselves
as well. So, we must ensure our own needs are taken care
of. Buddhists also seek appreciative joy, which is valuing
everything given to us and every moment we have with
others. We do not seek to own or control others, and
because our moments with each other are fleeting, we
have even more reason to value them. And, finally, love is
equanimity, being able to find calmness in even the most
stressful situations. It means understanding the negativity
around us without reciprocating it.
Judaism
Within Judaism, one of the core tenets is to love others
as you would love yourself. This also means we should
develop a strong love for ourselves so that we may develop
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a strong love for others. This is the Jewish concept for
romantic love, as well, symbolising equality in every
relationship. The Jews also speak of a love for God, which
means to worship, obey, and surrender all that one has to
live according to His commandments.
Hinduism
Hinduism has 5 stages of love. The first stage is Kama,
which is pure sensory craving—physical pleasure above
all—though without shame or guilt. The second stage is
Shringara, which is a romantic love, including both sex
and intimacy. The third stage is Maitri, which is generous
compassion, or a motherly love for all living beings, and is
the most giving and least selfish. The fourth stage is Bhakti,
in which you go beyond cultivating a love for all others
and devoting yourself to a higher power, whether a god,
or a highest form of kindness, truth, justice, etc. The fifth
stage is Atma-Prema, which is unconditional self-love.
While in earlier stages, love was directed to the outside,
it is now directed inside, but with an understanding that
we are all one, so a deep unconditional love of the self
is a love for all. Within Hinduism it is not necessary to
renounce romantic love to reach higher stages, just that
progression happens through the stages.
The Common Threads
Several religions talk about sexual and romantic love, but
we’ve already relegated those to selfish needs satisfaction.
Almost every religion includes a selfless, self-sacrificing,
devotion and love of God. While I certainly don’t
discount or discredit such accounts of love, they belong
to the realm of transcendence and constitute a personal
journey that is beyond the scope of this book.
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What remains is to love one another as you would
love yourself, a love between equals, motherly love,
commitment, and the four aspects of Buddhist love. We
also have several accounts saying that love, essentially,
isn’t selfish. Another, very important thread, is that love
isn’t an emotion or a feeling, but an attitude—a state of
being acquired through experiences—a way of life. We
have feelings within love, such as compassion, but love
itself is an attitude.
Knitting it All Together
Now we must use these threads and our first principles to
create a coherent theory. Since the most common thread
is to love others as you would yourself, we should start
there. To remove the confusion about how we should
act towards others, let’s focus on what it means to love
ourselves. So, what is the most positive, enduring attitude
we can have towards ourselves?
Well, as we spent half the book learning, we don’t have
much control over how we treat ourselves. Our motivation
comes from our needs and our purposes. Then, the most
positive attitude we can have towards ourselves is one of
growth and development, to expand our functionings to
enhance and gain independent capabilities to satisfy our
needs and reduce our insecurities, thereby setting us free
from control by our body and psyche.
But does this philosophy of love match all the ancient
wisdom? Is there compassion? A major part of the
development of independence involves mindfulness,
which is knowing yourself and when you’re ready to grow
and when you need time to recover from the traumas
that life throws at us. If we push ourselves to develop too
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fast, we’ll burn out and will likely neglect some of our
needs, leading to more problems. So, yes, compassion is
a necessary aspect of healthy growth and development.
Does attending to our own development require
commitment? Absolutely. We can easily give up or give in
to the push and pull of our needs. When life gets tough,
many do give up and allow their hunger drive to take over,
eating through all of their emotions, or using substances
to dull everything. We need a commitment to bettering
ourselves to continue to do what we need and want to do
to gain all the benefits of our development. Yes, there is
commitment to healthy growth and development.
Does our own personal development live up to the
Buddhist aspects of love? Loving kindness is caring and
nurturing, and caring about our situation and nurturing
strength and independence in ourselves is development.
Compassion, we’ve already agreed on. Is there appreciative
joy? A major part of the reason we develop independence
is out of recognition that nobody and nothing are in our
lives from beginning to end. We seek to gain comfort
and intimacy everywhere we can get it, which requires
trust and appreciation. Deciding to spend the effort on
developing ourselves shows an appreciation for who we
are and what we can become. Regarding equanimity,
with further mindfulness and understanding of ourselves
and our situations, we gain the ability to be calm even
in times of distress. When we recognise the sources of
our distress and have gained the independent capability
to satisfy them, there is no need to worry. If we’re not
developing at the rate we’d like, mindfulness will help us
to understand why, thus allowing us to remain calm.

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The Art of Loving
Our theory of human development lives up to ancient
wisdom on love, at least for ourselves. How, then, do we
love others? To develop ourselves, we take control of our
lives and do what is necessary to gain independence.
However, means can corrupt ends, so adopting a policy
of control will not result in spreading independence and
freedom. We can’t take control of others and facilitate
their development in the name of love.
Up to this point, we have seen that love is an attitude of
selfless commitment, in which both the means and end
are development. There’s also another aspect of love
we’ve yet to apply to our theory of development and
that is motherly love. How does a mother love her child?
While there are many contradicting examples from our
lives about how mothers treat their children, we already
have many of the aspects that stipulate a healthy love. For
example, in Asia, there is the model of the Tiger Mom, in
which the mother fiercely works to develop her child as
much and as fast as possible.
I was tutoring a five-year-old girl in China at one point,
and during the summer, she spent two hours per day with
me studying math and English, an hour on swimming
lessons, two hours with a piano teacher, and two hours
with a Chinese teacher—a total of seven hours. She had
no friends and seemed like she rarely interacted with her
parents. While she was surely going to be ahead of her
classmates, she was likely going to have social and esteem
issues in the future, and who can say she’d ever have a
chance to discover her purpose? The Asian Tiger Mom
expects her child to bring honor to the family, to become
successful, and most likely to take care of her parents in
their old age, but isn’t concerned with social skills.
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A healthy motherly love, however, nurtures, protects,
provides and prepares children for independence, and
then asks for nothing in return.
So, how do we love others? In all of our dealings with
people, we can have their best interests at heart. You
might be asking, Well, how do we know somebody’s best
interests? and the honest answer is you won’t, at least
not completely. You know their best interest is their own
development and independence, but you don’t always
know if they’re ready for a life lesson or a break from it
all.
This takes experience, and I learned this most acutely
from my best friend, Patricia. We’ve known each other
since 2011 and we’ve become so close that we actually
call each other Twin. When I had my first realisations
about love and human development, out of love for her,
I sought to contribute to her development relentlessly.
She wasn’t in the mood in every moment of every day to
be gaining a life lesson. She’s intelligent and constantly
growing at her own pace anyway. By trying to force a
more rapid development, I was creating problems in
her life, problems between us, and problems in my life. I
found that the best way I could love her is to try and be a
healthy influence in her life and to be there for her when
she needs me, while also respecting her independence
everywhere in between. She does the same for me. We’ve
had many growing pains along the way, but now we’ve
arrived at a perfectly healthy friendship based on love,
mutual interest, and independence.
If you Love Someone, Set Them Free
This is what it means when somebody says if you love
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them, set them free. It’s not about romantic relationships
and setting them free so they come back into a romantic
relationship with you again. It’s about actual respect for
their life process and their own growth and development.
Years after my devastating breakup, when my ex-girlfriend
had seen the changes I had gone through, and she was
still her elegant, unicorn self, we talked about possibly
trying again. Because we loved each other, however, we
couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have been happy in her suburban
Canadian life, and she wouldn’t have been happy flitting
about the globe with me. So, while I was still in love with
her, and loved her, the best thing for both of us was to be
free to seek the kind of lives we wanted, while being there
for each other if necessary or desired.
Love for All
Now, while I say that I love her, we only chat maybe
once per year or two. You might be saying that it can’t
possibly be love if we rarely talk to each other, but this
leads me to another very important feature of love. I do
love her because in all of my dealings with her, including
my own thoughts, there is an attitude of love. I respect
her independence, and I’m here for her if and when
she needs me, as long as it doesn’t violate my own love
for myself, which she would understand. Now, if I can
say I love somebody I rarely talk to, how many people
might I claim that I love? All of my family and friends?
Every woman I’ve dated? Surely my students since that
relationship is all about development? What about
everybody? Can I love everybody? Can anybody love
everybody? The answer is, yes, I do, and anybody can
love everybody. But how does that work?

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First, we need another realisation about love. To love
somebody is not necessarily to like them. To love is to
have an attitude towards somebody of contributing to
their growth and development. It makes the world a
better place, and it makes my life better, if people around
me are developed or developing. The more people
become independent, the less need they have of using
and abusing others. When our needs control us, other
people are objects of needs satisfaction. Only when we’re
free of our needs can we look at people and act in mutual
interest and out of love because there’s nothing, or very
little, we need from them. This is when some sort of
altruism is actually possible.
When we don’t like people, it’s often because they’re too
selfish, disrespectful or untrustworthy. If they develop
themselves, however, they no longer need to be that way.
The chaos of their needs makes them like that, while
growth and independence will make them more secure
and remove the necessity for them to act in ways you don’t
like. If we contribute to their development, we’re helping
them move towards becoming people we could like and
who would better like themselves. If we act towards them
with hostility and neglect, we’re helping them to become
more like people we won’t like and who will even more
dislike themselves.
How do we love everybody, including those we don’t
like? Most importantly, we respect their independence,
so we leave them be. We don’t infringe upon their lives
negatively or needlessly. Don’t grab everybody on the
sidewalk and tell them that you love them as this will
annoy them and likely hurt your relationship with them,
and does not contribute to your or their development. If
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at any time you have any dealings with anybody, be your
healthy self and act towards them with respect. This does
not mean to do whatever they want. You have to respect
yourself as well. It mostly means to be honest and fair and
generally respectful of people.
But how do you love somebody who is being disrespectful
to you or others? First, we need understanding. That
disrespectful person is not a bad person, as perhaps the
circumstances of their lives and the chaos of their needs
created their situation. Any of us could victimise others if
our situations were reversed.
Second, I don’t want to give any specific advice here
because I might be misconstrued and somebody may end
up standing up to an armed gunman or something. I trust
you to figure it out. Sometimes the best thing you can
do is to be quiet and, at other times, tell the unwelcome
truth. Sometimes it’s to stand up to aggressors or stand up
for the victimised. If you’re somebody who has learned to
love, you’re an extremely valuable person to this world,
so the world will benefit more from your continued love
much more than from your sacrifice. The only life we
have control over is our own, so we’re the only ones we
can push towards development. Loving and respecting
yourself are equally important to loving others.
Sometimes, out of love, we need to say no to people.
Letting people take advantage of others can lead to
negative development, and isn’t loving the people being
taken advantage of, including ourselves. Saying no can
force somebody to develop their own independence.
It’s not so simple, because many factors come into play,
but this is all part of learning how to love.
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Love Ain’t Easy
Love is not easy, and this is why it is necessary to master
the satisfaction of our needs. As long as we have selfish
needs affecting our motivation, it is always possible for
our attempts at love to be corrupted. This is why loving
ourselves more allows us to love others more. Additionally,
as we gain more experience in learning what is good for
ourselves, and what isn’t, we’ll naturally learn more and
more how to love others.
As we master the satisfaction of our own needs, there is
no more fulfilment in spending our energies on ourselves,
thus creating the gaping vacuum. So, having mastered
the capability to love ourselves, we can then add loving
to our purpose and put that capability to use in loving
others. Our experiences in learning how to love others
gives us additional insights into how to love ourselves
even better. Loving others as you love yourself becomes
a constant feedback loop, enhancing your ability to love.
Feedback is absolutely essential to love. Just as our
bodies are designed to give us feedback when we’re
doing something wrong so that we’ll address it, if we
don’t receive feedback from society or other people, we’ll
never learn to adjust our behaviours to get what we need
and want:
• If people don’t know why they’re failing socially,
they’ll never learn how to be accepted.
• If people are never told why their productive efforts
are failing, they’ll never be able to correct them and
improve their esteem.
So, just as we need feedback, we must be honest and
forthright with others so they have all the information
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they need to adjust. That being said, just because you
tell somebody you don’t like something they said or did
doesn’t mean they need to adjust to suit you. We are
merely part of a global feedback loop. Maybe they’re
the one who’s right and you’re wrong. However, if many
people tell them the same thing, they will have a good
reason to consider changing what they say and do.
In summary, love, whether for ourselves or for others, is
an attitude that seeks the development of independence
through compassion, nurturing, and respect. In order to
love others, we must first love ourselves, and once we do,
it is possible to love everybody.

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 Lesson X
Happiness

At this point, understanding human development,

purpose, freedom and love, we must discuss happiness.
Why go through the effort of development, commit
our lives to something, face the chaos of uncertainty in
freedom, or allow ourselves to love everybody if it doesn’t
make us feel good, or happy? We like the occasional
exertion of effort, but we like to enjoy ourselves in other
ways, too. We want to be happy.
But what is happiness? This has been a source of debate
for thousands of years. There have been many attempts
at defining happiness, with some of them being utterly
lackluster, while others are generally correct but not
explained well enough, or having logical bases to be
convincing enough.
Any theory needs a logical base because we can’t just
create definitive lists of attributes and toss them into the
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air. While the field is too large to do a comprehensive
scan, we’ll have to limit it to some of what I’ve come
across. Maybe somebody, somewhere has gotten it right,
but I doubt anybody has put it all together as I have. So,
let’s have a look at what’s out there.
Statistical Happiness
One of the dominant lines of thought is that happiness
is a subjective, overall assessment. The World Happiness
Report from the United Nations asks you to rank the
quality of your life from one to 10. Finland is usually
the happiest country in this survey. The World Values
Survey asks you to rank your happiness from one to five
‘taking all things together’. Most recently, Colombia was
the happiest according to this report. Two surveys using
subjective assessments gained very different results.
Colombia and Finland are vastly different from each
other in every metric. This doesn’t mean that either or
neither of them belong at the top, though. Subjective
happiness surveys are flawed from the beginning.
If I ask you how happy you are, you’re going to give me
a completely different answer at different times. Imagine
your different ranges of happiness when you’re on
holiday; at work; stuck in traffic; on Saturday afternoon;
on Monday morning; on a sunny day; on a rainy day;
after sex; while hungover; when stressed; after finishing a
big project; when you’re in love; when you’re recovering
from heartbreak. Even though the questions ask you
about your overall life, do you think these factors won’t
affect your view of your life as a whole? Humans have
short emotional memories. It’s very difficult to say you’ve
had a happy year if you’ve had a horrible week.

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There’s a cultural aspect to a person’s perceived happiness.
In different areas of the world, people are expected to
feel a certain way about how happy they are. In Eastern
Europe, people would be considered impolite to brag
about how happy they are, so they understate their
happiness. In Scandinavian countries, people constantly
are told that they live in the most developed area of
the world and should be proud and happy with their
lives. However, Scandinavian countries have high rates
of suicide, and Danes have a reputation for only being
friendly and sociable while drunk. Suicide and substance
abuse reveal that not all is well.
As far as surveys go, the Oxford Happiness Survey is
the best I have seen so far because the survey looks for
symptoms of happiness or unhappiness. The approach
doesn’t appear to be perfectly enlightened just yet, but
at least it’s more representative of real life. In many
Western countries, people might think they’re happy, but
if you examine their life, you’ll find they’re not. Regular
substance abuse, overeating, and chronic distraction
would reveal problems that are being avoided rather
than addressed. A symptom survey, however, puts the
assessment in the hands of professionals to decide who is
happy and who is not. While that is more legitimate than
letting people judge for themselves, the public won’t like
the idea. So, surveys, at least as they are now, don’t work.
However, academics love to have numbers to analyse,
whether they’re legitimate or not, so I imagine surveys
will be around for a while. This book should go a long
way towards improving surveys, as it reveals what should
be considered when framing questionnaires.

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Economic Happiness
Since new psychology gives us nothing to work with,
lets see what the economists say. The common economic
conception of happiness is that happiness is simply a
positive feeling, experienced in the moment, such as
joy. However, we all know joy and what causes us to feel
joyful. There is no debate over joy. There is no search
for a life of joy, but there is a debate over happiness and
lifelong searches for it. Joy is an emotion, happiness isn’t.
Economists continue with the thought that happiness
is when we have more positive moments than negative
ones. So, if we’re awake approximately 16 hours per day,
a happy person feels positive more than eight hours per
day. This philosophy, however, opens up a whole host
of problems. The first problem is that, as I said, we have
short emotional memories, and all experienced time
is not equal. Time flies when you’re having fun, right?
You might spend a great 10 hours out with your family,
picnicking, playing sports, and generally enjoying the
weather and each other’s company, but then come home to
find your house was broken into and then you spend four
hours with the police filing a report and going through
the house documenting what was stolen and broken, as
well as calling people to come fix your windows or doors.
The 10 hours of fun would have flown by, and the four
hours of shock, insecurity, and annoyance likely would
have dragged on. At the end of that day, most people
would not say, today was a good day, simply because over
half of it was good.
Another major problem with this concept, and something
that is actually being seriously considered somewhere,
is that if we created a drug that could promise positive
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feelings without negative consequences, everybody
would likely take that drug to become happy people.
While I don’t believe we have this drug yet, we do have
means and methods of avoiding negativity. All of the
methods of distraction discussed throughout this book
help to reduce negativity. However, as we have discussed,
these distractions simply aid to stop our development.
Pain and negativity, while uncomfortable, are necessary.
Paul Dolan, a professor at the London School of
Economics, wrote a book, Happiness by Design: Change
What You Do, Not How You Think, which has merit but
still doesn’t get it quite right. Dolan essentially says that
we should arrange our lives in such a way as to deliver
the most happiness; the most time spent feeling positive.
While I’ll discuss its merits later, the problem with this
concept is that it is still a distraction. At the time of
writing, he seemed to be a new adherent to fitness so, of
course, he focuses on distracting ourselves with health
promotion, which is good, but he still promotes a model
of distraction. He says, change what you do, NOT how you
think.
As much as we’d like to have complete control over
our lives so everything is rosy every day, we don’t. The
persons who distract themselves from hardship aren’t
prepared for hardships. When we set up a life that works
to keep us feeling good every day, we become dependent
on the life we’ve built. When we are dependent on things
or situations for our happiness, any hint of a threat to
them puts us in great distress. And, just as threats to our
relationships can cause us to become toxic in our defence
of them, further ruining the relationships, threats can
be the same with everything we become dependent on.
Ultimately, we destroy them in an effort to keep them.
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Setting up the perfect life doesn’t allow for as much change
as we need. As we cycle through needs satisfaction with
changing motivations, our perfect life is going to change.
Change brings chaos and chaos brings uncertainty and
insecurity. The person who is dependent on their given
life for their well-being isn’t ready for a change.
Dolan is holding too true to Giddens’ theory. Yes, we
seek order and predictability, but once we reach it,
we seek to explore from our position of safety. This
exploration inherently introduces new chaos because it
isn’t exploration if it’s predictable. So, any theory that
says happiness is a momentary emotion and that we are
happy if we spend more time being happy than unhappy,
is incomplete and courting disaster. Failed by new
psychology and economics, it’s time to return to actual
thinkers again.
Eudaimonia
The ancient Greeks had a term that closely translates into
happiness: eudaimonia. The actual translation is more
like good spirit, but this term serves our purposes and, if
understood correctly, helps us to understand happiness.
The general idea behind the concept of eudaimonia is
that a life of virtue, guided by reason, is necessary to have
this good spirit, this happiness.
What is meant by virtue and how does one come to have
virtue? If we always do what is right, will we eventually
become happy? Well, some believed we would, while
others affirmed that we could not find happiness by
following the rules of others. Who decides what is right
and what isn’t? What if we decide for ourselves what is
right or not?
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The key here is virtue guided by reason. The word
virtue can be quite vague to many. Virtue to the ancient
Greeks wasn’t only related to morality, but to excellency
and mastery as well. You could say that honor, speed,
strength, and dexterity are virtues in a warrior. So, then,
virtues guided by reason would include all the virtues or
mastery that are logical and reasonable for us to attain.
We could throw out some random virtues that come
to mind, such as courage, honor, commitment, and
honesty, but they’d be random and we want a logical
base. Thus, the development of independent capabilities
to satisfy our needs is the development of virtues
necessary for eudaimonia. Our virtues would be those
of self-sustainability, security, social prowess, assertive
confidence, independence, purpose, and love, and the
virtues necessary to develop them.
Positive Psychology
In fact, there’s a field called positive psychology that has a
similar list of virtues leading to happiness. While positive
psychology is still relatively new, its psychologists at least
do more thinking than those I call the new psychologists.
In the 2011 book Flourish, by Martin Seligman, he
proposes five elements to well-being, with the acronym
PERMA (positive emotions, engagement, relationships,
meaning, and accomplishments). If you’re paying
attention, you’ll see that they closely line up with aspects
of needs satisfaction without covering all needs—the
problem with random lists based on observations. It
always helps to have a logical base.

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Buddhist Happiness
Buddhism did well in explaining love, but how well
does it explain happiness? Well, Buddhism is all about
the eradication of suffering by eliminating all forms of
craving. If we left it there, it would coincide perfectly
with our virtuous framework. However, the path they
prescribe to reach happiness, the Noble Eightfold Path,
is one of restraint and following the rules. It is similar to
Confucianism in that you must act noble and happy until
you actually become it. Needs are mastered by repressing
them and giving them up as opposed to actually satisfying
them. Maybe Buddhism is misinterpreted, I don’t know,
but Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, himself, learned these
things through experiencing them. He told his followers
that he grew up very spoiled by his parents. It is one
thing to give everything up when you’ve had it to excess,
but quite another to refrain from things you’ve never
experienced.
Reverse Engineering Happiness
Either way, we’ve arrived at a point where the old meets
the new, and we understand that human development
is a path to happiness. However, I don’t want to simply
promise you that if you develop yourself, you’ll be happy.
I don’t want to simply trace a line from development to
happiness, I also want to trace a line from happiness to
development, further reinforcing how it all works.
First, let’s start with an exercise. I want you to imagine
you are at your favourite outdoor location in the world
in your favourite weather. You breathe the air, your
favourite air. You look about at your favourite scene.
You feel invigorated. Now, also imagine that you don’t
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have a care in the world: no debts or any money issues;
health is without complaint; relationships are without
complaint; you generally feel good about yourself and
your capabilities; you’re care free. So, how do you feel? I
don’t know about you, but I get giddy just thinking about
it, though I imagine you do, too.
I picture the coastal cliffs of Newfoundland (look them
up), facing the sea, with a partly cloudy sky, and a strong
breeze—not warm but not cold—fresh! The air smells of
the sea, grasses, wildflowers, and spruce and pine trees;
it’s all the comfort of home, a familiar place. I can’t feel
anything but good in that moment.
When we learn to satisfy all of our needs by having those
moments in which we aren’t being signalled by the body
to take care of this, that, or the other thing, this is what
life is like. We see and feel beauty everywhere. Our needs
and our insecurities are constantly pulling us away from
the moment we’re in. If you have low self-esteem, while
you’re there in your perfect landscape, you’ll probably
take photos to post in social media. You’ll look up long
enough to take the photo and then be glued to your phone
again. If you’re lonely, you’ll take a quick look and get
out of there to get back to people. Personal development
manages, and makes us an expert in, all the areas of our
lives that cause us suffering.
Our happy setting isn’t quite perfect. We’ve only put
ourselves in this setting for a moment. Now imagine
yourself staying there and looking at that same scene for
days, months, years. All of your needs are taken care of,
so you don’t go hungry, and friends and lovers come by
from time to time, and you have no esteem issues, but
still you’re not doing anything else besides sitting and
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watching the view. If you’re feeling particularly burnt out
right now, this situation might sound like the best thing
ever, but in reality you’d grow bored very quickly.
The first thing to go would be your esteem. You feel good
when you’re overcoming challenges and accomplishing
things. When you’re not doing anything, everything
you’ve done in the past starts to lose its importance and
effect on your esteem. Remember our short emotional
memories. Once your esteem starts to fail, you will
look at others with their apparent motivation as better
than you, and this view might cause bitterness and self-
isolation, possibly ruining your relationships. As your
relationships fail, coupled with your low sense of worth,
you’ll start to abandon good health maintenance as you
may overeat or abuse substances. In our experiment, you
clearly didn’t have a job if you sat watching the view every
day, but in real life, if you found yourself in this situation,
your work ethic would suffer, putting in jeopardy your
material survival.
This slide backwards is what happens when you don’t have
purpose. We need motivation to act and our motivation
comes from our needs. If all our needs, besides purpose,
are fulfilled, we have very little reason to act in any way.
However, our unfulfilled need for purpose causes us
to want to comfort ourselves, and if we spend too long
in comfort, we start to unravel. The major difference,
however, between this slide and being at a low stage of
development, is that you still have the capabilities and
the experience to satisfy your needs. This allows you to
turn things around instantly as soon as purpose is found.
Eventually, after unravelling for some time, your purpose
will be to turn things around once they’ve become too
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unavoidable. So, it’s possible that you’ll turn things
around again and, still, without purpose, slide back
down again.
Purpose or Happiness?
Finding a purpose—finding a lifelong endeavour that
fulfills you—is essential for happiness. A quick Internet
search would reveal that many experts say finding a
purpose is more important than happiness, but I have to
disagree as everything has its place. Purpose is essential
but not the only essential virtue.
This is also where the merit in Dolan’s book comes in.
Once you’ve found your purpose, you might be tempted
to dedicate yourself entirely to that purpose. However, as
I’ve said before, mastering your needs doesn’t make them
go away. Designing our life must be in such a way that we
can easily satisfy our other needs as well as our purpose.
The difference between the developed and undeveloped
person doing this is that the developed person isn’t
dependent on the structure. Having mastered the
satisfaction of each need, when one part of your designed
life changes, you are well equipped to redesign as needed,
without any distress.
I have learned these lessons acutely over the past few
years. For a long time, even though my life was constantly
changing, I could design and redesign at ease, fulfilling
all of my needs without any distress. However, over the
past couple years, I’ve focused on my purpose to the
detriment of my social life, which caused an unravelling.
So, even though I’m a person who can now find happiness
anywhere, and it’s rare that anything will make me feel
unhappy, these past couple years, I have been clearly
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unhappy with my life. The difference, however, is that
I’m fully aware of the cause and have the power to change.
Another problem I have from time to time is a lag in
purpose. As a teacher, I have summers off, and, of course,
during the pandemic, I’ve had much more time off. And,
as I’m often changing my outlook for the next year, I’m
often in limbo, without any orientation and no idea what
to prepare myself for. When I’m not actively working
towards a purpose, I start to unravel. We really need to
be firing on all cylinders to hold it all together. But, again,
the difference is that once you learn you’re unravelling,
you can re-ravel at will. Writing this book is one way in
which I’m addressing my situation.
When I say that I’m unhappy with my life, it’s relative. I
still see beauty everywhere, almost nothing bothers me,
I laugh every day, and I love everybody, but I recognise,
acutely, the affect that my diminished social life is having
on me. So, I’m unhappy but still happier than most, and
I know exactly what to do to be happy again.
A Reformulation of Happiness
Without relying on the concept of eudaimonia, or Dolan’s
happiness by design, my own theory of happiness states
that we don’t only need to have positive feelings most
of the time, but we must be able to have positive feelings
most of the time, even under difficult circumstances. This
type of happiness has three requirements. First, we must
learn how not to be unhappy. Second, we must cultivate
happiness. And third, we need purpose.
Learning how not to be unhappy first of all requires the
mastering of needs. Many of our unhappy feelings come
from need deprivation. Feelings of loneliness, a lack
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of belonging, or low self-esteem can dominate us and
prevent us from living happy lives.
Equally important is the overcoming of traumas. Our
traumas taint every experience and the way we look at
the world. They can cause us to be distrusting and fearful,
making it difficult to show mutual vulnerability, hurting
our ability to form close relationships. While I’m no expert
in war or conflict related traumas, I’ve seen people who’s
lives have been greatly affected by their experiences, still
many years later. I fully recommend seeking help. Since
traumas affect our perspective, it is incredibly difficult to
get through them alone. Furthermore, for anybody who
has sought help and felt it to be ineffective, progress isn’t
necessarily linear. You will not feel a little better every
day until it’s over. Think of psychology as building a
base from which to launch from. When we’ve learned
enough to understand ourselves, our traumas, and how
they fit into our lives, then we can have realisations that
drastically affect us.
Forgiveness
We benefit from learning to forgive. As I’ve said several
times, our harboring of ill will and distrust punishes
nobody but ourselves. Remember, to love doesn’t
necessarily mean to like. We can forgive people and then
not include them in our lives. Before we can love others,
we must love ourselves, and keeping people in our lives
who hurt us isn’t loving ourselves. However, this does not
mean we can’t forgive them and love them. Being honest
and telling somebody that they hurt you and that you’d
both be better off by staying away from each other is an
act of love for both of you. You remove the toxic person
from your life and they gain a valuable learning lesson
that might benefit their development some day.
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How do we forgive? We realise that each person is a
product of their needs and experiences. The person who
hurts others doesn’t necessarily choose to hurt others,
they’re simply acting out of their own interests without
considering the effects on others. Forcing them to see the
effect on others, and the subsequent effect on themselves,
can help them to gain a new perspective on what is in
their best interest. But when we see that people are
products of their experiences, including their traumas,
we don’t need to maintain blame against them. We can
ensure they know what they did wrong, forgive them,
unburdening ourselves, and then choose to keep them in
our lives or not. We can simply choose to let it go. Even
if we don’t have the opportunity to tell them how they
hurt us, we can forgive them and let go, choosing to love
ourselves rather than carry the burden of hate or distrust.
Just as we can unburden ourselves by forgiving others,
we can also forgive ourselves. If anything you’ve done has
caused you great pain and regret, let that pain teach you
a new way of being. Learn the lessons the pain begs you
to learn. Once you have learned, and you can be assured
not to do it again, let go.
As much as you may have hurt others from your actions,
the lessons you learned now ensure that you won’t even
be tempted to again. You are now a better person than you
were before, and your previous actions are responsible.
You cannot go back and change the past; you can only
change who are and what you do in the future. We feel
pain to teach us a lesson, not simply to torture ourselves.
Learn your lessons, atone, and let go.

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Acceptance
Forgiveness, and the acceptance of other hard truths,
is crucial to happiness. If you don’t accept that you’re
self-interested, you’ll find people don’t appreciate your
attempts at altruism as much as you’d like. Or you might
find yourself in constant need of appreciation because
you haven’t mastered your esteem. Furthermore, not
accepting your self-interestedness will prevent you from
focusing on and mastering yourself.
When we accept that everybody is self-interested, we’re
able to learn that we are not and never will be the center
of anybody else’s life. Even when we believe we are, this
happens only because sharing their center stage with
us serves their interests at the time. Accepting this hard
truth will save us immeasurable disappointment in life,
as our friendships and other relationships blossom and
decay. Nobody owes you their attention, and you’ll only
get their attention as long as it serves them. So, give up
your expectations and appreciate the attention you get.
While crossing the land border between China and
Mongolia, I had my big backpack stolen. Since I had
left Canada indefinitely, I had gotten rid of everything
I owned, so now all I owned was in that backpack, and
a small daypack that I always kept with me. So, that day,
I was left standing in a small border town in Mongolia
where nobody spoke English, and everything that I
owned in the world was stolen, except my wallet and
passport.
At first, of course, I was fuming. I had no idea how to
get out of that town, and I had no clothes other than the
shorts and t-shirt I was wearing. While it was summer,
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Mongolia is dry and at a high altitude, so it’s very cold
at night. While I started the day angry and disheartened,
just a few hours later I was able to laugh at my situation.
After all, I was physically fine and I was on my way to a
job in Mongolia, so I’d have money and belongings soon
enough.
The people who stole my bag probably needed it more
than I did. And, they weren’t stealing from me, Patrick.
They were stealing from an object, a foreigner, so there
was no personal offense. With spirits raised, I managed to
talk with one Mongolian girl who also spoke Spanish and
her family helped me to get train tickets and I travelled
with them overnight to the capital of Ulaanbaatar. So,
while I arrived at my destination without belongings,
I had new friends and a story to tell. I was able to feel
confident when I had nothing because my development
has made me employable and able to make relationships
with people who can help me when I need it.
Live as if it’s Your Only Life
Another hard truth is that this is the only life you’ll have.
Even if there is a soul and reincarnation or heaven, while
the spirit is not a part of the body, the conscious memory
is. Everything we do is tempered by memory. We can
only confidently walk down the sidewalk because we’ve
done it many times before. When we walk on thin ice or
in mud for the first time, we do so cautiously because we
don’t have the memories to tell us what to expect. Our
first few romantic relationships are cautious in some
respects because we don’t know what to expect. The
point is, every action we take is affected by memory, and
we’ll only have memory of this life while in this life. So,
live this life as if it’s the only one you’ll ever have.
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However, that doesn’t mean it’s in your interest to take
and destroy because that life will leave you unhappy,
unfulfilled, and untrusted. There are no rules, so you
can live that life if you like, but as you do, pay attention
to the feedback that you get from the world. Does the
destructive life give you all that you want and need?
Does this philosophy conflict with religion? If you believe
in an omnipotent God or gods that can look into the
depths of who you are, they would see the lessons you’ve
learned, yes? If you master your needs and no longer
have the desire or temptation to exploit or hurt others,
while also finding beauty in the world and learning how
to love, do you think such a wise being would forsake
you for your transgressions along the way? Who is more
capable to serve a religion, the person who has temptation
but fights it every day because they are told to do so, or
the person who is free from temptation because they
understand how it hurts themselves and others?
Life is Beautiful
While learning how to let things go and not be unhappy
is crucial to happiness, we must also be able to see beauty
in the world. When we learn that we don’t deserve
anything, that everything we take for granted isn’t our
natural right, we can start to appreciate everything.
While I was angry and distrustful of Mongolia when my
bag was stolen, that theft didn’t stop me from making
friends with Mongolians and falling in love with their
country, culture, and people. That family didn’t need to
help me and they didn’t get anything in return besides my
company. And, even then only one of them was able to
talk to me and then only in Spanish, which was a second
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language for both of us. Whatever their self-interested
reasons may have been, they don’t matter to me and I
appreciated their help and their company immensely.
When we develop ourselves and are no longer fighting
against our needs, we can direct our attention from the
inside to the outside. In major Chinese cities, they take
great care to line the streets with trees and flowers. Even
school campuses are like beautiful parks. Every day was
a joy to walk to work, no matter the weather. At work,
I carefully observed each of my students, seeing their
different personalities, their joys, and their sorrows as I
learned how best to teach so that they may learn. Without
personal development, I’d be spending my free time in
the classroom or on my walk to work thinking about my
own issues.
One thing that helps us to gain appreciation is diversity.
I grew up in Newfoundland with the bay directly in front
of our house, and I spent a lot of time on the farm in
and around nature, yet I had very little appreciation for
it at the time. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time in the
megacities of the world and when I tell people how I
grew up, they consider it a dream. Only after leaving did
I come to appreciate the land and the culture of home.
Having lived in every climate on every continent in the
world (except Antarctica) I have gained an appreciation
for all peoples, cultures, climates, and landscapes. Their
difference and diversity make them beautiful.
Along my way, I’ve met many travellers who don’t see
beauty everywhere because they’re travelling the world
either to escape their reality or looking to fill a hole inside
themselves. So, while they’re going abroad, their focus is
still within. When we’re still focused on ourselves, we’re
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only paying attention to that which helps us to satisfy
what we need and missing everything else. I think travel
is a rite of passage that all people should be fortunate
enough to be able to do, but I also think it’s better done
when most needs are mastered, so the world can help you
gain perspective, find yourself, and find purpose.
Having learned how not to be unhappy and turning your
attention to the outside world, discovering the beauty all
around you and appreciating all you have, you still need
purpose. As I said before, even with all needs mastered
and learning how to see beauty everywhere, without
purpose everything starts to unravel. As everything
unravels, our focus turns to the inside again, and we fail
to see beauty and appreciate what we have. We need a
purpose, a master drive to direct all other drives to give
us reason to master ourselves and gain the ability to love
without attachment and to be happy. It’s okay if your
purpose is constantly changing, but we all benefit from
having purpose every day.
Having a purpose is like having a goal. While your
purpose doesn’t need to be SMART (specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant, and timebound,) it does need to be
something that you can work and make progress towards.
If your purpose is to be a good person, that’s too vague
and too difficult to direct our other drives. Who is a good
person? Why is it in my interest to be a good person?
What am I going to do today, tomorrow, and next week to
be a good person, and become a better person?
I hope by now it has become clear that all aspects of
our well-being depend on our personal development.
Through the mastery of our needs, we gain awareness
and power over our lives, removing insecurities and any
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other reasons to feel bad. This frees us to look outside of
ourselves, to see beauty and to spend our energies loving
others, helping them to do the same. Furthermore, the
mastering of the rest of our needs frees us to find purpose,
which is necessary if we’re to have a coherent, beautiful,
and loving life.
So, happiness is not simply being happy most of the
time; it’s having the capability to be happy most of the
time. When we’ve moved beyond unhappiness, have
purpose and appreciation, and see beauty everywhere,
life essentially becomes heaven on earth. It becomes a joy
to live, and the idea that life is suffering seems far from
the truth. However, we must suffer to reach happiness,
as we need to pay attention to pain and the chaos of our
needs to develop ourselves. But, when we understand that
each and every negative feeling is an indicator, revealing
the direction we need to move in for growth, even this
negativity becomes welcome; it beckons us forward into
happiness.

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 Conclusion

In this book, I provide a roadmap to gain freedom, love

and happiness as by-products of personal development.
By expanding our functionings (increasing the number
of things we do), to develop independent capabilities to
satisfy our physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-
actualisation needs, we will remove almost all the sources
of unhappiness from our lives, while freeing ourselves
from having to look within to being able to look without,
to see beauty, to love everybody, and to be happy.
While freedom and happiness are by-products, love is
as well, but it is more of a choice; of an attitude to gain
towards the world. When we love, we consider the best
interests of the other at all times. This can range from
leaving them alone as they go about their business; to
being honest with them so they have correct information
to process in their lives; to being there when they come
to us; to intervening when we feel they really need it. We
can make the choice to love, but we can learn to love well.

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Human Development: A Re-Education in Freedom, Love and Happiness
A major aspect of loving is the respecting of freedom
because others need to be free to expand their functionings
to increase their capabilities to gain freedom from their
suffering as well. As this love is an attitude, and not a
romantic emotion, I believe governments can also adopt
love as a development strategy. Facilitating development
is in the best interest of everybody. The developed will
be less likely to commit crime, to use violence against
others, or to abuse government services, and they’ll likely
be more productive and positive members of society.
Furthermore, with more people free to self-actualise,
we’ll have more people dedicated to solving the problems
of the world, instead of contributing to making it worse.
For those seeking a more transcendent experience
than the gaining of capabilities to satisfy needs, human
development is necessary before transcendence is
possible. Without development, we’re ruled by our selfish
desires, and as long as we are so ruled, we cannot attempt
any oneness with a higher power. By mastering the drives
under the will to power, we can at least gain oneness with
ourselves, freeing us to gain oneness with something else.

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 About the Author

Patrick Whelan was born and mostly raised in Colliers,

Newfoundland, Canada. Some of his earliest memories have
been of philosophizing on what it means to love. He has
spent his entire life actively searching for what it means to be
human so we can gain control over our lives and attain
freedom, love, and happiness. This journey has taken him to
military pilot and officer training; to backpacking around
the world, studying cultures, religions, languages, and
people; as well as enlightenment yoga in Thailand, and Kung
Fu under monks at the original Shaolin Temple in China.
For 2 years he worked as an advocate against sex trafficking
in Moscow, creating a research group and organizing
conferences. He’s also spent 5 years teaching nearly every
subject in international high schools in Mongolia and China,
including one year as Discipline Head and another year as
Principal.

He holds a Bachelor of Strategic Management, minoring in

Math and Physics, and Master’s degrees in International
Development and Political Theory, minoring in Philosophy,
Sociology and Motivational Psychology.

Human development and love are his greatest passions and

everything he does is in service of them.