I spent an evening not long ago with someone who has given a large part of his life to a single question: why do human beings feel so disconnected, and how do we find our way to feeling whole. I respect that question more than almost any other. It's close to the center of my own work too.
Where we differed was quieter than a disagreement, and more interesting. He described the path to connection as something built. Years spent studying, one serious field after another, each one mastered in sequence, before the experience of wholeness becomes available to you. Something earned through study, at real cost in time and money, before it's yours to have.
I didn't experience it that way. I never had to build my way there. It was already the ground I was standing on, the whole time, waiting to be noticed rather than constructed.
What I Noticed About the Fields Themselves
At one point he named the disciplines that had shaped his search. I won't list them here, but I'll tell you what struck me. Every one of them was a formal field of study. Written down. Specialized. Taught in institutions. Each one born long after the split between connection and separation had already happened.
Here's what I keep circling. He wasn't trying to get back to whatever existed before the split. From where he stood, that older, unbuilt version wasn't the destination at all. It was something earlier, and in his view, something less complete. What he was building toward was new. More sophisticated. Only reachable by moving forward through all those fields, never backward past them.
Which raises a different question than the one I started with. If every one of those fields was invented after the split, tools built entirely on the near side of separation, can they really produce something more whole than what already existed before any of them did? Or does more complexity, however elaborate, ever actually resolve a problem that complexity itself created?
I raised something close to that question with him, gently, out of real curiosity rather than argument. Something shifted in the room. Not anger exactly. More like a system running into a question it didn't have a slot for.
I don't think that's a personal failing. I think it's the same reflex we've talked about elsewhere in this space, identity meeting a question it wasn't built to hold, and reaching for solid ground instead of sitting in the discomfort a moment longer.
Who Gets Called Simple
Here's the part that stays with me longest. For much of modern history, people who lived in direct, unbuilt relationship with the natural world, indigenous peoples in particular, were called simple, unsophisticated, behind, as if a way of life that looks simple from the outside proves the understanding inside it must be simple too. Even now, even among people generous enough to admire indigenous ways of knowing, that connection to everything quietly gets filed as something smaller than what years of formal study or practice can produce. Unearned. Inherited, maybe. Not quite as real. And yet none of it needed building. It only needed recognizing nature as the whole they had always been part of, already there before anyone thought to construct anything at all.
So, I suggest that simple might be pointing the wrong direction. A belief in total separateness is about as simple as an idea can get, which may be exactly why it's so hard to trade in, even once you can see connection would be the better experience. What if the most useful, most satisfying understanding was the one that never needed an institution to complicate it?
This idea sits close to Chapter 7 of The Lens That Changes Everything, on why connection was never a belief to adopt, only a lens available to anyone willing to look through it. If it's the kind of thing that stays with you, Being Jonas Wilder brings it into the room, live.