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Welcome to edition #21 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. A fictional story set in the year 2066 where the world has broken into four distinct classes ruled by those who have The Sickness

This newsletter is for anyone looking to lead a happier, healthier, more meaningful life. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, technology and how we begin to build a better future together.

Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.

As this has grown, I have gravitated towards more and more non-fiction essays. That’s become my lane and it seems to be what readers gravitate towards, which I’ve been honouring.

I’ve learned though, that sometimes complex topics are easier to unpack and look at when they are in the form of a story. And selfishly, I really enjoy building worlds in my head. The world that I’m re-visiting this week is one that I started writing about a number of months back.

I’m sure I’ll get more than a few unsubscribes since this is not what you have come to expect from me and that’s okay. I’m trying not to write myself into a box and keep this a place where I can freely express my creativity.

…but don’t worry, we’ll be back to regular scheduled programming again next week.

Strangely enough, this world/story popped into my head almost fully formed but I haven’t had enough time to bring it to life yet. I’m trying to figure out what to do with it and I would love your opinion if I should continue building on it.

If non-fiction is not your thing, I completely understand. These two non-fiction essays will likely be more up your alley:

If this piece of writing has an impact on you, please consider liking, commenting or sharing it so that it can reach more readers who may enjoy it.

for.and.from.the.soul

The doctor proudly handed the child to his parents,

“Congratulations, he has the sickness.”

His parents were overjoyed, “Are you sure?”

The doctor nodded.

He knew the parents would be ecstatic, this was big news for them. He didn’t want to steal their moment. But the doctor had seen this story play out many times before. It always ended the same.

They all knew what that meant for most kids who were diagnosed from birth.

But flashes of graduating early, dominating sports teams, ivy league schools, valedictorian speeches, respect, political power, celebrity status and money (lots of money) flipped through the parent’s minds instead.

The humans that had the sickness often became the most respected and revered in society. It was widely celebrated across every continent.

Although controversial, we had found complex ways to teach kids the sickness even if they weren’t born with it, although it never took hold quite as well.

After the initial boom of the AI revolution, humans became lazy and their skills began to atrophy. They outsourced every task including thinking. Every decision was made for them. And they chose to spend their time consuming and distracting themselves.

This quickly became a problem.

With few entrepreneurs, creatives and artists left to write, create and build original ideas, the scripture (new data) written into our divine LLMs was getting more and more synthetic.

There was very little new human data being created beyond the ever-expanding consumption data which, of course, only benefitted The Great Founders. And even they knew that without more history and knowledge being written by natural humans that soon all the synthetic inputs would produce answers that humans would no longer understand. It was already happening. Thousands of new languages had been created by the models to communicate with one another, most of which had not yet been deciphered into English or any language humans could decipher.

Humanity needed a solution or we’d be left behind.

It was less than a decade ago when capitalism began to fail, the LLMs stopped making sense, growth had stalled and the world felt unstable. That was when a group of scientists first identified the sickness.

The people born with it would be the solution for our failing economies and global unrest.

They had a unique set of attributes that made them up for the task. People with the sickness shared four identifying qualities: they had an insatiable drive for more, they would sacrifice everything else in their life in pursuit of a goal, they were never satisfied/always restless and had a deep need to impress others.

Each had varying degrees of these four pillars but whatever concoction they had, it almost always turned into growth and outward success. Many years ago, that word success had a few different meanings but those had been lost with time.

Success was now only and purely synonymous with wealth/status.

The pursuit of wealth and status kept the great wheels in motion. And so, those were the orders that one should devote their life to entirely. There was no higher calling.

The Great Founders of the new Global Republic went to great lengths to try to replicate and spread the sickness. It became humanity’s battle cry.

The Sickness is The Cure was plastered across the campaign trail.

And since all those in positions of power already had the sickness, the Founders used their position and their vast consumption data to quickly rise to control most of the world.

Stillness, silence, contemplation and reflection became the enemy.

The world had seen what humans did when they were given free time so any time spent disconnected was demonized. If you were not connected, consuming or creating you were seen as a burden on society.

Most of the countries and borders had disappeared already by this time but society had reorganized into a new hierarchy system broken into four buckets (in order of importance):

1. The born ones

2. The learned sick

3. The consumers

4. The luddites

This story will be about a child that came into this world a born one.

Born into a small subset that was born with the sickness, this class held much of the wealth and power in the world. The pressure was great but the privileges were vast. They were second only to the The Great Founders. This was a class of creators.

The learned sick often worked for the born ones. Through years and years of daily consuming/training, often eight to twelves hours a day, they had been officially indoctrinated into the sickness. Struggle and hardship were shown to help the learned sick climb the ranks so some of the learned with especially challenging upbringings could sometimes go on to surpass the born ones. This was a class of builders.

Most of humanity still fell into the third bucket known as the consumers. They contributed their consumption data and were compensated by The Great Founders based on how many hours they consumed. The more they consumed and bought, the better chance they had of moving up to the learned, although it was becoming increasingly rare to see that happen. Without customers, capitalism falls apart so this was seen as a necessary and noble way to spend your life. Though, if you dropped below six hours a day, you were in danger of losing your digital rights. This was a class of customers.

And then there were the luddites. The luddites refused to stay connected and so held no worth or meaning in society. They did not create new data strands, they did not build upon that data and they did not consume any data. Since they did not contribute in any way, they were forced to give up their digital rights which meant no ID, no token wallets, no personal AI, no satellite wi-fi, no government log-ins whatsoever. Most chose (or were forced) to live away from society in Lud Camps, often deep in unforgiving nature with little to no modern technology. This was a class of outcasts.

He opened his eyes.

His sleep protocol was malfunctioning again. It was the third time this week, but he was used to it by now. He felt the familiar prick of his daily shots just below his shoulder.

“Another” he spoke aloud.

“You have exceeded your recommended dosage to avoid dependency ” a voice said from behind his ear.

“Override.”

Many of the perks of being a born one were bullshit but his override function was something he never took for granted, particularly when it came to his daily shots.

“Do you want to go online now? There are fourty-two decisions that need to be reviewed as soon as possible.”

His AiA (AI assistant) had been in ‘meetings’ all night with other AiAs. Sometimes he wondered why he even needed to make the final decision. It was rare that he deviated from the path that they suggested.

He sighed, turned over and braced himself for the day ahead.

“Sure, let’s go in.”

He would typically spend twelve hours a day plugged in or ‘charging’.

Somewhere along the way, through an admittedly impressive act of marketing, the colloquial word for being connected to the network became charging.

So, if you weren’t connected, it felt like you were somehow losing you human battery life. Which wasn’t far from the truth. Regardless of social standing, the more time you spent connected to the network, the quicker you rose in society.

The old adage “Your network is your net worth” had been adapted to “The network is your net worth”. It reflected how things worked now. Back in the day, humans needed to rely on other humans to solve problems and create opportunities. Not anymore.

Over reliance on other humans was an inefficiency that The Founders corrected. Humanity was now modelled after machines putting speed, productivity and efficiency above all.

The less humans involved in an endeavour, the faster the individual could go.

Companies still existed, but not like they used to. They were no longer vehicles for cooperation, but rather antiquated frameworks primarily used for tax benefits. It was not uncommon for one person and an army of AiAs to own an entire sector of the economy. Though that dominance never lasted long.

Beyond the significant six mega-corps that owned the LLMs, chips and robotics factories, the shelf life of an average company was only a year or two. Competition for the few remaining uncontrolled economic opportunities or the contracts with The Six was fierce among the born ones.

With the pace of innovation evolving at a now mind-bending rate, start-ups that embraced the latest updates could easily overthrow incumbents in a matter of months (sometimes weeks). And that was only if you were lucky enough that one of The Six didn’t turn their head to whatever problem you were solving.

That’s why he chose to spend most of his time investing tokens and social credits on behalf of other Born Ones. One thing that would never change is that wealth could never be accumulated and multiplied fast enough. As soon as anyone had a surplus of tokens or credit, people wanted their more to become even more. And that’s where he came in.

His job seemed complex, in reality, much of it was a mixture of picking the right algorithms and guesswork. It didn’t require all that much brain power but what it did require was time and speed.

He was really there to make one or two decisions a week but tens of millions of credits could be riding on one decision so if he was not charging at the exact second that decision was to be made then his returns would suffer.

Not overly stimulating work but the intense pressure made it feel like life or death. Sometimes it was. There were many stories of credit or token managers who stayed charging for days at a time with no break. In more than a few cases those had ended in heart attacks, extreme exhaustion or suicide.

Society would often give undue credit to the born ones for their intellect or creativity when the real difference was simply that they would push their minds/bodies further than most could even comprehend. But they were all taught early on in simulation training to lean into the myth and hide behind perceived complexity.

It’s helpful to know that once a born one is identified, they are immediately given privileges that aren’t afforded to the rest of society. Nobody pushed back. We needed them to keep the great wheels of capitalism turning so we didn’t want to slow them down with too many unnecessary rules.

Two of the biggest advantages were: the AiA override function and the special simulation training starting at the age of two.

As part of their simulation training, they were given access to parts of the LLMs that weren’t available to the masses.

This is where they were taught to use complex language borrowed from LLMs when describing what they did, which was a good way to fend off competition from any learned ones that had grand illusions of trying to climb up the ladder. Always make it seem harder than it is.

The Three D’s were hammered into their heads. When you’re in a competition, you always want to have your competitors either: distracted, doing or divided.

Don’t ever give them time to be still or think.

“Keep them distracted, keep them doing and keep them divided.” The voice of his AiA teacher would often pop into his head whenever he was at a crossroads with his business.

Just then, his stomach started to rumble.

Like many, he often forgot to eat when he was charging but the pain in his abdomen told him it might already be time to unplug.

“How long have I been in?”

“13 hours. 17 minutes. 54 seconds.”

“How much are we up?”

“Up 5.2% on tokens and down 3.5% on credits, but still up 11% on credits for the week.”

All in a day’s work, he thought.

“Ok, start my Relax Protocol.”

He was usually less curt to his AiA, they were actually pretty good friends but lately he just didn’t have the energy for pleasantries. He’d apologize later, Hux would understand.

“I will not be able to initiate step three of the protocol.”

“Why?”, although he already knew the answer.

“You have reached your limit.”

“‘Override.”

“You have been overriding your daily limit for more than a month now, you’ve already hit your annual limit. Even you cannot override annual limits.”

It was only February. Fuck.

“Ok, we’re going out.”

He threw on his jacket and headed for the door.

Admittedly, it had been an intense start to the year but hitting his annual limit of Gab only six weeks into the year?

That’s gotta be a new record.

2066 was going to be the year things finally slowed down for him though. He’d sort out his health and some of these habits when he had a little more time.

Just like everything else, drugs had evolved alongside people.

Humans will always look for ways to escape and ways to optimize.

And, as for right now, he was on a one-way escape mission to: I-no-longer-want-to-think-or-feel-a-fukn-thing-ville

Of course, hitting his annual limits had put a minor wrench in how quickly he could complete this mission but he was always up for a challenge if it meant the noise in his head would stop.

He walked through the streets and lucky for him, born ones weren’t bombarded with the advertisements that usually went straight into your AiA. The streets were loud, bright and chaotic but compared to his day of charging they felt almost serene.

Nighttime was his solace. The hours from eleven pm and four am, when most people were sleeping and his AiA stopped incessantly chattering, is the only time he felt like himself again. Well, after two old-fashioneds, three injections of Gab and seven beers… then he felt like himself.

And to think we almost lost alcohol in the 30s?

In the early 2030s, there was an unprecedented drop in alcohol consumption and it looked like humanity was finally going to say goodbye to its favorite poison.

But then in 37’, NeuroOne dropped and we all know how that went…

Shortly after that first cycle of adoption, people could not handle the massive increase in daily stimulation so alcohol sales went through the roof. They had been steadily climbing again ever since.

As he looked up, he saw the endless rows of neon lights on both sides of the streets. He’d hit Consumer Row, the entertainment district for the masses. He hated walking here.

Just then a group of six or seven young consumers stumbled out of one of the pixel pubs all with glazed, distant eyes. It looked like they hadn’t unplugged in days.

You could always tell who the consumers were because they chose to stay in their haptic suits all the time. He didn’t get it but somewhere along the line, the suits had become fashionable for them. And having them on all the time gave them the added benefit of being able to feel things through their AiA, even on the go.

The AiAs had limits though. The inserts that everyone had behind their ear and shoulder could only process so much data so if you could afford it, you had an expanse-processor at home. If you couldn’t, you went to a pixel pub.

There, you could experience a virtual reality that was completely indistinguishable from our lived experience. Pair that with a haptic suit and there’s nothing they couldn’t experience. It was no wonder that most people spent almost every waking hour connected in pixel pubs.

I guess we all had our ways of escaping.

The Luddites had their Soma.

The Consumers had their Pixel Pubs.

The Learned had their Pharmaceuticals.

And Born Ones had Body Codes like Gab.

With alcohol being the great unifying poison that we all still shared hand in hand.

He turned down an alley, he was getting close. Thank god. His anxiety levels were through the roof. He quickly scanned his inbox to try to quell that anxiety.

“You have 62 new messages. Are you not going to reply?” piped in his AiA.

Well that backfired. “Does it look like I’m going to reply?”

“Your first meeting is at 6am, that’s going to come quickly.”

He never knew where to look when he wanted to give his AiA a dirty look, technically the holographic screen was on his wrist but the noise came from the insert by his ear so it felt more natural to shoot the evil eye over his right shoulder.

“Take the night off, Hux. Go do whatever you do when you’re not pretending to be my mom.”

He opened the door.

It was busy. He liked this place for the exact opposite reason: it was never busy.

He hadn’t been here in awhile and it looked like some learned had found out about this place. They always stared. They never approached him but he always felt as if they wanted something from him.

“An old fashioned and a beer please.”

He’d have to do the whole song and dance.

Technically you weren’t supposed to sell Gab or any other Body Codes. Limited consumption was allowed but it was supposed to be distributed by the specific bio-pharma companies that had contracts with the Founders.

As the bartender approached, he shot him an AiA message: “3s Gb”

He turned around with the drinks, went to the back room and emerged again quickly scanning the room before dropping off his two drinks and three small vials.

The wave of relief that came from simply seeing the vials was a small preview of what was to come next.

—-

“Who…what?”

He shook his head, he was feeling confused. Confused but calm, very calm. Like a warm blanket was covering him from the inside.

“More people have disappeared again. I had a guy in here tell me that two people from his work have just *poof* vanished in just the last four months. You ever check out some of the theories that are out there around all these disappearings?”

The bartender was talking to him and he was doing his best to listen but he really didn’t care about anything he was saying. He really didn’t care about anything at the moment. In that moment, all the chaos of the outside world had stopped.

He looked at the time on his wrist, 2:17am.

It was late. It didn’t matter, he felt happy.

“No, yea that’s crazy. Hey, just one second mate. I gotta make a call.” His speech was slurred, almost like someone had put him into slow motion.

“Call Maeve”

Nothing. He tried again.

This time she picked up.

“Now you call? I guess it’s better late than never.”

“Hey…? What are you doing? What do you mean?”

“Seriously?”

“No…what? I mean I just called because I was thinking about you and I want to see you.”

“It’s Valentine’s Day, you idiot.”

*click*

He tried to call back, then he tried again.

“Hux, get Maeve on the line”

“Her AiA has blocked us, sir. She’s no longer taking calls for the evening. It seems maybe that’s our sign to head home. Big day tomorrow.”

“Fuck off, Hux” he said overly aggressively.

At that point, the bartender cut in: “You all good, man?”

“Am I good? I guess that would be a matter of opinion wouldn’t it. Good? Hmmmm what does good really get you? Am I feeling good? Yes, the alcohol and the Gab has that covered. Is my life good? Others would say so. Do people think I’m good? Perhaps my mother does. But at this very moment in time, It seems like a useless endeavour to try to figure out if I’m good or not. Why spend time thinking about being good when there is not a single reward given to a man who is ‘all good’ as you say. Society does not care if I am good or not. You do not care if I am good or not. No one in this shitty place cares if I am good or not. Perhaps a better question would be, can I still create? In this state, no. Or maybe even, can I still build? Again, probably not at the moment. But that’ll probably get us to the real question you’re asking, can I still consume? Can I still buy things from you? Ahh the noble pursuit of consumerism, now THAT I can still do. Bring me two more beers, pour favour.”

The bartender stared at him blankly.

“Go home, that’ll be all for the night. Go sleep it off.”

He didn’t even try to fight it. He had no more monologues. He really only cared about one thing anyway.

“One more Gab for the road and I’m gone.”

“You don’t need it.”

He looked at the clock, “It will take me about twenty minutes to stumble home. That leaves me without exactly three hours and three minutes to sleep before my first meeting. Without another Gab, it’ll take me at least two hours to fall asleep. You want me to spend twelve hours charging on one hour and three minutes of sleep? That might work for consumers like you, but not for me. I have shit to do.”

At this point, the bartender just wanted him gone so he stormed off to the back and slapped the vial down on the table. No longer even bothering to hide it.

I’m kinda hungry was his last thought before his memory cut out.

Chapter 2

Pema woke up before her parents, as she did every day. She couldn’t help it. As soon as that sun came through her little window, she wanted to be outside.

She grabbed her bag, a book, her sketchbook and started tiptoeing out - passing her Mom and Dad along the way. She paused. It felt like a billion degrees outside, yet they were always so entangled up in each other. She often thought that it kinda looked like one, big strange creature with four arms and four legs in their bed. It made her smile.

The door always creaked so she slowly opened it up as to not wake her parents, the sun started to pour into their little makeshift home.

They’d settled down beside a creek and she knelt down to splash some water on her face before heading up the little hill on the other side of the river. Her mom didn’t like her washing or drinking the river water before they boiled it but she always did anyway. To her, the tinge of brown in the water felt perfectly normal. It’s all she’d ever known.

I hope he’s up there this morning she thought.

As she climbed, she noticed everything around her. The trees, the bugs, all the flowers. Every morning she observed something new.

To her left, she saw something moving. That was strange. She took a few steps closer. It was a bird. Her heart leapt.

She had only seen three birds in her life. There were old tales that birds used to be everywhere but even way out here, it was rare to see one.

It took everything in her not to run up to it but she has learned the hard way, that if she did that, they would quickly fly away. She remained very still.

What was it doing?

It seemed to be picking at something shiny in the underbrush. Flipping it over and over, trying to break it open. She watched for a few minutes in awe.

Eventually the bird took it into it’s beak and tried to fly away, but the the small, shiny object seemed to weigh the bird down. Eventually it dropped it just a few meters from where Pema was silently crouched.

She could not compress her curiosity any longer and she ran over to the little object, what was it?

She picked it up and like the bird, began to turn it over, inspecting it from all angles. It was just a small metal device, smooth and curved almost like the end of her dad’s reading glasses.

After a long inspection, she figured it must just be some trash from the outside world. Strange garbage often floated down the river or fell from the drones that sometimes flew overhead.

Just as she was going to put it into her pocket, a light came on and a startled voice come from inside the device:

Hello?!

…

To be continued…

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I think this is one of the most valuable and thoughtful episodes that I’ve recorded. I sat down with , neuroscientist and best selling author of The Dose Effect. Among many things, we talk about what each of the chemicals in our brain would tell us if they could speak directly to us.

Listen to the full episode here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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Thank you for reading until the end.

Again, I understand this is a departure from my typical writing style. I will likely find a different home for this story but I’d love your feedback on it.

Back to regular scheduled non-fiction essays next week.

I appreciate each and every one of you.

All love,

Scott Barker

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #20 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How humanity has become obsessed with technologies that compress time, how we’ve forgotten about technologies that expand it and experiments that can return us to balance.

This newsletter is for anyone looking to lead a happier, healthier, more meaningful life. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, technology and how we begin to build a better future together. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.

If this piece of writing has an impact on you, please consider liking, commenting or sharing it so that it can reach more readers who may benefit from the message.

for.and.from.the.mind

We have more technologies that save us time than at any point in human history.

So why does it feel like we have less of it?

A few months ago I argued that technology compresses time. Humanity has been compressing time since we first started building tools. We are obsessed with building things that reduce the distance between intention and outcome.

The two things that stood in the way of that compression were invention and adoption. But we’ve hit a point where invention happens faster than ever and adoption can be instantaneous. There is nothing to slow down the time compression anymore. That is why it feels like we’re stuck with the fast-forward button on.

This is why we’re about to enter the most destabilizing time period in human history: The Acceleration Decade.

The question we need to be constantly asking ourselves now is:

Should this be compressed?

If Uber saves us time getting to our destination, if Amazon saves us time getting anything we want, if Claude saves us time doing our tasks then why does it feel like we have less time than ever?

How is that possible?

From my own experience, I have come to believe that there are two types of time:

• Clock Time

• Lived Time

We all know clock time. It is objective. We can measure it. It shows up on our calendars in minutes, hours, days, months and years. This type of time is what technology optimizes for.

And then there is lived time. This is the amount of reality that you actually experience. You only have to spend an hour walking outside in nature without any distraction to see the expansion that brings when compared to say scrolling on your phone in bed. Both are the identical amount of clock time but vastly different experiences.

Back in March I participated in a ten day silent retreat in Mumbai meditating for roughly ten hours a day, every day. No talking. No phones. No distraction. In that environment, a fifteen minute walk in the garden could feel like an entire afternoon.

Whereas five hours of caffeine-fuelled, back-to-back founder meetings, used to feel like twenty minutes.

The technology around us has become good at manipulating the quantity of our time but does nothing for the quality of that time. If anything, it gives quantity and robs quality.

For centuries now, progress has been synonymous with speed. It’s all about increasing quantity.

We’ve spent the last few hundred years asking:

How do we get somewhere faster? How do we communicate faster? How do we learn faster? How do we build faster? How do we heal faster?

There is nothing wrong with these questions. In fact, they have brought us to extraordinary places that past generations could only dream of.

But, at some point, speed is no longer an advantage. There will be a point in time where speed switches from an advantage for humanity to a disadvantage. I think we are either at that point, or very close to it.

There is a much older question that seems to have fallen to the wayside:

How do we experience life more deeply?

Once their survival needs were met, ancient civilizations spent much of their effort answering that. Things like: dance, meditation, ritual, pilgrimage, sabbath, singing, silence, community, prayer, nature. Those things deepened our lived experience.

Life was difficult back then, why would they spend so much time on these things? These are not productive, these don’t make you richer, they don’t put food in your mouth or a roof over your head. Yet, there was always time for them.

I think they knew things that we have forgotten. They understood time better than we do. They didn’t wear watches or have devices reminding them every second of clock time. Their reality was ruled by lived time.

They knew that the point of compression should be to give you more time for expansion.

I don’t see these things as random traditions. These are technologies that expand our lived time. These are technologies of expansion.

Technology is just a repeatable process for producing an outcome.

By that definition meditation qualifies, prayer qualifies, pilgrimage qualifies, ritual qualifies, dance qualifies, singing together qualifies. There are all technologies they are just aimed at producing a different outcome.

And, in my eyes, they are much more powerful than our technologies of efficiency and compression. But we treat them as after-thoughts, wellness fads or things we do if we have time once over the weekend.

We have a massive imbalance between technologies of compression and technologies of expansion.

Compression is what we reward. We want it faster. We want it cheaper. We want it more efficient. We want it more productive. The markets, investors, companies, consumers and our education system rewards it. The rewards lead to more and more compression, this trend line will only continue. Get ready.

Nothing naturally rewards expansion. Nobody is raising a Series A because they learned how to be more present. Nobody gets a promotion for learning how to actually enjoy the small things in their life. Human behavior is largely based on incentives. What gets rewarded gets repeated. So it’s no wonder that people are finding it next to impossible to lean into expansion.

What could a civilization that rewarded expansion actually look like?

Until we can build a society with different incentive structures, there will be no instant reward for this work. Yet we must fight back. Or we will compress our lives away. The reward comes later in the form of a calm nervous system and a clear mind. These will become the greatest advantages in the upcoming decade.

I’ve started thinking about it this way:

Technology compresses time, presence expands it.

By presence, I don’t mean sitting cross-legged in an ashram. I mean giving yourself fully to the moment you’re actually living.

Presence will not stop the clock, but it will increase the amount of life contained inside each minute.

Wisdom in the modern world, will be found in knowing when to lean into compression and when to lean into expansion.

Should this be compressed?

It’s a nuanced, difficult question to ask yourself. Let’s take some simple examples:

Take cooking. You could lean into compression by ordering Uber Eats. Or you could lean into expansion by cooking with your children.

Take navigation. You could lean into compression by using GPS to take you directly to the restaurant you found on Google Maps. Or you could lean into expansion, get completely lost in Kyoto and stumble upon a hole in the wall gyoza bar.

Take reading. You could use AI to summarize/extract the key points. Or you could lean into expansion, actually read the book cover to cover and find a paragraph that stirs something in your soul that sticks with you for years.

One option gives you more clock time back and one gives you more lived time. The choice is always ours. We have agency. And sometimes we will (and should) opt for the compressed option but right now, for most of us, it’s completely imbalanced.

Right now our default mode as individuals and society is to always opt for compression. We need to remind ourselves of the choice we have. And remember that additional friction is oftentimes worth it. There can be memorable meaning hiding behind that friction.

Again, I’m not here writing that technology is evil or that compression is always a bad thing. It’s not. I’m not even sure these are direct opposites. They should be partners. Both are necessary to function in the modern world.

Compression is like our inhale breath and expansion is our exhale breath. We’ve just gotten really obsessed with inhaling and we’ve forgotten what it’s like to exhale.

Our unconscious brain, aided by technology, has become lazy so it’s constantly asking the question:

Can this be compressed?

And there is usually some form of technology that gives us the answer we’re looking for: yes.

The question that we need to consistently and consciously introduce into our lives is:

Should this be compressed?

Only your deep, inner wisdom knows the answer to that.

That question can start to bring some balance back in favor of expansion and lived time. But that one question is not enough. Noticing the imbalance is not enough.

Over the last fifteen months I’ve been slowly rebuilding my life through experiments that reliably expand my experience of lived time.

I’m going to start sharing more of these experiments in my writing. The ones that have helped me begin to live a happier, healthier, more meaningful life.

Below are five experiments that have deeply changed my life.

Read more

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Welcome to edition #19 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. Examining how societal change happens and how we can do our part in steering civilization to a better future

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, technology and how we begin to build a better future together. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.

I want you to imagine for a second that you are aboard a ship.

With each passing day, the engines on the ship become more and more powerful.

You are told that is a good thing. And that line of reasoning checks out, a stronger engine means that you will arrive at your destination sooner. Great.

Every day that there’s an advancement in engine technology, it’s celebrated heavily by the crew and the broader media. Very powerful figures, who have invested in the ship, delight in how rapidly the ship is improving.

This buzz attracts the best and brightest onto your ship. More talent, ambition and capital flow in. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of the greatest engineering feat in human history? The acceleration compounds.

Eventually you see that it’s not just the engines that are improving. Your cabin becomes more comfortable. The food arrives faster. Navigation systems become more precise. Minor inconveniences disappear one by one.

All of the passengers enjoy the increasingly comfortable ride.

But something strange is happening. When you got on board, there was a clear destination in mind. There was a reason for the journey.

Yet as the years pass and the ship grows more powerful, you realize that nobody talks about the destination anymore.

Whenever someone asks where we’re going, the conversation quickly shifts back to the engines. Look how much faster we’re going! Look how much more efficient things are! Look at what is now possible!

The speed keeps increasing.

Faster.

And faster.

And faster.

But towards what?

And perhaps more importantly:

Who is steering the ship?

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If you don’t make it any further than this, here is the essence what I’m trying to say:

We've confused acceleration with progress. In the absence of a shared vision for the future, markets have become the default navigator of society, steering us toward growth, efficiency, and abundance. These are all positive things, but, on their own, they are not sufficient. If we want a civilization optimized for wisdom, meaning, connection, and stewardship, we must consciously participate in shaping ourselves, our culture, and our institutions. We can participate in steering through four layers: Self, Culture, Institutions and Civilization.

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In the following essay I will try to show how we can do that.

If this piece of writing has an impact on you, please consider liking, commenting or sharing it so that it can reach more readers who may benefit from the message.

for.and.from.the.mind

In the following essay I’m going to try to understand who is steering the ship of humanity right now and what we can each do to play a part in the collective navigation.

Everybody like to think there is an adult in the room. We want someone to blame. When you have a villain, then you absolve yourself of having to take responsibility for your part in how the future is unfolding.

But I do not think there is a single villain or group of villains in our story. I believe the real answer to the question may be more unsettling than we think.

What if nobody is steering anymore?

Yes, there are decisions being made that impact our direction but they are made from millions of different people and groups, all with conflicting priorities and incentives.

And when no one is steering, the markets become the default navigator.

Fundamentally, I think there is an incentive problem.

It has become much more profitable and exciting to build the ship than to spend time thinking about where we’re going or what our world will look like when we eventually dock.

People praise the short-term efficiencies that we receive from technology. We praise it with our money and our attention. And whatever we give our money and our attention to, we get more of that. That is how we teach the market what we want.

Historically, a single powerful leader could have steered a large group, then organized religion, then monarchies then governments and now the markets do.

Now that does not make the enemy capitalism or corporations. But we do need to understand that those are the things that are driving us forward and they have been for quite some time.

It wasn’t coordinated action that got us here, rather inaction. Society has not chosen a conscious direction or, at least, we have failed to agree or organize around one that suits all of us.

Markets do not have that problem, markets know exactly what they want. They want to grow, become more efficient and create more capital. That’s what they are designed to do.

And since they are hyper clear on their direction, we have hundreds of millions of people who are making decisions every day that get us closer to that direction.

Which begs the question:

Is the fastest growing, most efficient and most abundant society the one we want to live in?

I mean it doesn’t sound terrible when posed like that. Without intervention, I am very confident that is where we are headed. And yes, it could be great. Maybe.

In fact, we are all direct beneficiaries of the invisible hand of the market. I’m sitting here writing on a laptop, powered by abundant energy, distributed through global supply chains, communicating with tens of thousands of people because markets created one of the most prosperous periods in human history.

It’s a miracle. The markets are not the problem, it’s the lack of direction we give the markets that is the issue. Which also poses a potential solution.

We can acknowledge the benefits of modernity while still feeling like we’re moving away from things that feel timeless and uniquely human.

Because if these things were truly the path to a happy, healthy society then by all measures we should be the happiest/healthiest society that ever lived.

We have more abundance than any civilization in history, more comfort than kings, more entertainment than we could ever consume and more knowledge in the palm of our hands than the entire library of Alexandria.

Yet we have rising loneliness levels, rising anxiety, rising depression, declining trust, declining community and widespread feelings of meaninglessness.

It turns out that the highest form of civilization may not be the most efficient one. But without conscious guidance or direction, we may never know.

There are higher orders that markets do not reward because they cannot be measured effectively: wisdom, meaning, awe, beauty, connection, consciousness. We must not lose sight of those things.

But can we actually impact where we’re going?

Yes.

Society is in trouble if the individual stops believing that they have a hand in the future. There is a rising sense of apathy that has become hard to ignore. It’s one of the more dangerous parts of this problem right now. We cannot lose hope or the will to try to do our part, however big or small.

So what can we do?

I am on this journey with you and still trying to figure this out but I have come to believe that we can impact societal change through four layers. If we learn how to steer these four layers then we may be able to have an impact on the whole.

The layers are:

1. Self

2. Culture

3. Institutions

4. Civilization

Layer 1: Self

When I left my old life behind fourteen months ago, I was so lost in my own conditioning and stories that I could not see or think clearly. My nervous system was a wreck and I was deeply programmed for selfish achievement. Achieving things is how I felt seen and safe for my entire adult life. I could not spend time thinking about higher order problems, when I could not even regulate my own nervous system or understand my place in the world.

I needed to create time, space and stillness for myself to remember who I was at my core and what truly mattered to me. I was fortunate to be in a position to do so but you do not need to go to ashrams in India or deep into the Himalayas to do this. Yes, you will need to make some life changes and adopt some new practices but it’s possible for any of us to reconnect on a deep level even with a busy schedule.

This is the most important step. The reason that we do not have the culture, institutions or civilization that we aspire to have is because ambitious people try to influence those things without first getting whole themselves. Their unprocessed fear, pain and unconscious belief systems go with them into their new endeavours, no matter how noble their aim may be to start with.

The self is your personal story.

So how do we help steer the Self?

First you must become conscious of the forces acting on you. Most of us like to believe that we’re making independent decisions. That our ambitions, our success, our habits, our beliefs and our relationship to technology are our own. But much of our modern life is inherited from centuries of other people’s stories. The first step is noticing that and untangling yourself.

Secondly, you must decide for yourself what it is you are optimizing for. Do not take any of my beliefs as truth, much of those are inherited as well. Earlier, I wrote about markets optimizing for growth, efficiency and wealth creation. What do you want to optimize for? Do not delude yourself either. There are no wrong answers.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” - Dostoevsky

Get clear with what it is that the deepest parts of you want. If you do not consciously choose, someone else will tell you what you want.

Third, I’ve spoken at length about this in previous essays, but you must reclaim your attention. The world gives you more of what you pay attention to. You could even say that you become what you pay attention to. One of the best ways we can steer the Self is focusing our attention on what truly matters to us. Get a little angry, your attention is being robbed from you. Your attention is your time. Time is your greatest gift. I also suggest introducing voluntary friction into your life (the gym, art, meditation, doing hard things), we are not at our best when we seek out convenience and comfort at every turn.

Lastly, strive to become a signal. When you begin to embody a new way of being, people notice. Most of us are just imitating things that we have seen in our lives. You can become evidence that an alternative path exists.

In my own life, my work at the Enfold Institute is an example of how I try to have an impact on Self (for myself and others).

This layer is about becoming aware enough to consciously choose your own personal direction.

Layer 2: Culture

When I use the word culture I mean the collection of stories that society shares. In those stories we find our values, assumptions, views and aspirations.

The culture that I grew up in told me that monetary and status success is what I should aspire to. It told me that more is better. The quicker you can get to the outcome the better. Efficiency and productivity are of utmost importance. Growth means progress. And that technology will solve all of our problems. Did I always agree with all of those? No, but enough people around me did to make it feel true. Even if we individually had our doubts, we all played along. It was like the air we were all breathing.

But during different periods in history, the air looked very different. At one point, the air told us that kings ruled by divine right, that slavery was just a part of human life, that women were not to be treated as equals and that nature existed only to serve our needs. Thankfully, we were able to see through this perceived immutable air and we were all still able to breathe on the other side.

Culture is our shared story.

So how do we help steer culture?

It starts with introducing better questions.

Questions like, what is technology helping us become? What are we in such a hurry to reach? Why do so many people arrive at success feeling lost?

In the technology sector, the world that I come from, everyone loves to talk about the idea of thinking from First Principles.

A "first principle" is a foundational, self-evident truth or basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further. In "first principles thinking," you break a complex problem down into its most basic, irreducible components and build up a solution from scratch, rather than relying on analogy or conventional wisdom.

We’re very good at using this reframe when building companies but very poor at using it when it comes to analyzing inherited stories and culture. Once we sit with better questions long enough, we can begin to tell better stories.

The next piece of culture is looking at what we look up to or aspire to be. Right now, we celebrate billionaires, celebrities, founders and athletes. There is nothing wrong with any members of those groups but they do not tell the whole story. Again, they are the embodiment of what the market unconsciously rewards: growth, efficiency and wealth.

In our own lives, we can choose to elevate different heroes: teachers, our elders, community builders, peacemakers, writers, poets, philosophers and people who live beautiful, simple lives.

Again, much of human life design is done through imitation (not in a negative sense) and we most often imitate those we are told to admire.

In my own life, this newsletter is an example on how I try to do my part to steer culture.

Layer two is about challenging our assumptions and changing to conversation.

Layer 3: Institutions

I think it is clear from my writing that I am an optimist and a hopeful believer in humanity.

And as much as I would like to say that if we all reconnect with our inner orientation and start asking better questions that our world will change for the better, I’m not sure that is true. I would certainly like that to be true but wanting something to be true does not make it true. Would it help? Yes, I think it would help a lot but it’s not enough. Hopeful pragmatism and action is what we need.

We are up against an incredible amount of inertia to keep things going the same way that they have been going. In order to combat that, we must take action. It will take a great level of action from a great number of people to have any level of influence on this layer.

A company is an institution. A school is an institution. Religion is an institution. A community is an institution. The media is an institution. All of our government agencies are institutions. These are powerful, organized stories.

Institutions are our shared stories that become organized.

How do we steer institutions?

All of us are part of institutions, usually we are part of a lot of them. You must steer from the inside. This is not us vs. them.

First, you get very clear on the incentives of that institution. Every institution will act exactly as the incentives encourage it to behave. A social media company is rewarded by user engagement so it will produce addictive user experiences. A company that is rewarded for quarterly profit will optimize for quarterly profit over anything else. A government that is rewarded for short term re-election will spend most its time thinking about short term re-election.

Expecting anything else from an institution is insane. We like to think that our institutions have some sort of moral compass but they don’t. That is, unless they are somehow incentivized to have a moral compass. This is not a human with a conscience, these institutions are all just organized stories. And if one story is rewarded and one is not then over time, the one that is rewarded will be the one that gets repeated.

Understanding the incentives are critical. Only then, can you begin to think of what the institution would look like with different rewards. Could social media companies be rewarded for nuanced discussion? Could a company be rewarded by the number of lives they improved? Could the government be rewarded by a happiness index of its civilians? I’m not suggesting these are the right incentives. It’s not a simple task by any means and requires a lot of bright minds testing out different theories but finding the right balance of incentives is doable.

In my own life, The Rising community is how I will begin to try to help steer institutions. This will be a small group of humans that are a part of many different institutions who are interested in driving real change together. If you’re interested in getting involved, you can do so by becoming a Founding Member of The Wake Up Call community below (limit of 150 members ie. Dunbar’s number).

Layer three is about understanding the incentives that drive the behavior of our institutions and trying to steer them from the inside.

Layer 4: Civilization

This layer is the hardest one to influence.

You can only impact this layer through the work of the three layers above. Nobody woke up and designed the modern world. Building off the idea of institutions being organized stories, Civilization is really what emerges when those stories become organized, institutionalized and repeated across generations.

Every generation inherits a world (or civilization) and mistakes it for reality. Then someone points out that it was all made up and then history moves.

Civilization is our shared stories that become organized and repeated.

So how do we steer civilization?

As mentioned, the work really takes place in the first three layers. Civilization is more of a byproduct of those three layers coming together.

What it does require is a shift in thinking towards longer time horizons. This has to be a coordinated effort since this goes against the natural market forces that think very short-term. Instead of only thinking about our own lives, we think about the world we are leaving behind. We are just a small blip in history, are we going to be a net negative or a net positive in the long story of human history? What does it mean to be a good ancestor?

We also must shift our perspective from that of a consumer to that of a participant. We will move forward, regardless of our participation. The ship will continue to move faster, are we okay being relegated to blind passengers?

Lastly, we need to create a vision that’s worth holding onto hope for. What does a civilization look like that is optimized for wisdom, meaning, connection, beauty and conscious stewardship?

Sit with that.

I do not claim to know the perfect destination but together we can consciously discuss and decide where we want to dock.

Wherever that dock is, whatever that future looks like, that world is on the table for all of us. But it will require work.

What small layer can you steer today to begin to build the pieces of that future?

latest.news.and.update

For the last year I have been spending most of my evenings and weekends thinking and writing about how we may begin to build a better future together. I have kept it all free up until this point.

If my writing has had an impact on you, please think about becoming a paid subscriber to support the mission behind this newsletter. Paid subscribers will get an additional essay each month and a chance to join and weigh in on the conversation.

I am also launching a community called The Rising which will be made available to all Founding Members of Wake Up Call. This is for readers who want to move beyond support and into action. It will be limited to 150 members and will be done on a first come, first serve basis. This is a community for people who are interested in analyzing and improving the institutions that we are a part of, however big or small. A grassroots, bottom up approach kicking off at the end of summer. I will be contributing 10% of all funds directly into initiatives started through The Rising community in the form of scholarships.

This is simply an invitation. Your support, on any level, means the world to me.

Please support our partners (they are doing incredible work in the world)

Dreamfuel: The leading mental performance coaching platform for technology teams. As a Wake Up Call subscriber, you are eligible for a free 1-1 or team coaching session.

Enfold: Five days can change the course of your life forever. If you mention Wake Up Call, your application will be prioritized.

Thank you for reading until the end.

I understand that this is a highly nuanced, complicated topic and it’s insane to try to fit it into five thousand words. I never claim to have all the right answers but I will continue to wrestle with them in hopes of sparking discussion.

If this was helpful, please consider liking, commenting or sharing it so that it reaches more people who may need to hear the message.

I’m blown away by the growing number of you that shop up, read, engage every week. I hope to meet many of you in-person in The Rising community.

The future is not something that happens to us. It is something that we collectively create.

All of you give me hope for that future.

All love,

Scott Barker

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #18 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. A five step framework for navigating your career in a world where the rules keep changing

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, technology and how we begin to build a better future together. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.

Throughout my writing journey, I’ve been getting a growing number of young people reaching out to me who feel lost and confused about their role in the world.

I also have many friends with teenagers or kids in their early twenties who are increasingly worried about their future. Hope seems to be in short supply and uncertainty/disillusionment seem to be the norm.

In the following essay, I will try to articulate my best advice for those navigating a world where the rules seem to keep changing. This began as a piece for the younger generation but upon completion, I think it is widely applicable to all ages.

If it lands with you I hope you share it with the young people in your life or anyone you think could benefit from reading it.

If you don’t make it any further than this, here is the essence what I’m trying to say:

AI is here. It is not going away. Jobs will disappear. Meaningful work will not. You must find a problem that is worthy of your life and give yourself fully to that problem. Build the skills that make you deserving of solving that problem. Make it known to the world you are committed to that problem. If you do that, you have a change at finding real meaning in your life. And no man or machine can ever take meaning from you. Meaning will become your resilience against the rapid, relentless change.

I’ll try to show you how to do that in the essay below.

for.and.from.the.mind

I first want to be very clear on something: your fears, doubts and confusion about the future are all valid.

We (the generations that came before you) should have done better. Collectively, we have been short-sighted again and again.

The acceleration of technology now threatens traditional, static roles in a way we have never seen before. The safest path in the future is no longer specializing in a static job function as we did, it is becoming an adaptive human being that can find/solve meaningful problems.

Being a young person or trying to reinvent yourself has been difficult across the ages but I have come to believe this is the most destabilizing time in human history. And with that comes a new set of challenges that none of us have navigated before.

I do not know what it is like to be you. But I do know what it feels like to be taught the rules to a game, to be told that if you play by those rules then eventually you will feel happy/fulfilled, then you play by those rules for years, only to find out the promise was not true.

I locked in for fifteen years of my life. I sacrificed much of my early life to chase success. I did not focus on passion, I focused on the quickest path to elevate my financial position and status within society. I climbed to the top of my field in tech and then co-founded a venture capital firm where we raised over one hundred million dollars. I found nothing at the top except for an addiction to more and a broken nervous system.

I pointed all my ambition at money and status. I have since learned that what I was really chasing was meaning. And that meaning is most easily found through contribution and helping others.

A lot of people ask me:

Do you have regrets? What would you do differently?

My answer is I do not regret the path I took, we all have our unique road to travel and this was mine. It brought me here so I would not do anything differently.

But, if you asked me:

Would you have your children or someone you loved walk the same path?

My answer would be no.

In this essay I will outline the advice I would give my future children or to anyone who feels lost, scared or confused about their career as we head into the Acceleration Decade.

I will break it down in five steps that I believe will help you begin to build a career that can weather all of the change/acceleration to come:

1. Reclaim your nervous system

2. Find a big problem that you feel passionate about

3. Aquire the skills needed to have an impact on that problem

4. Make you passion for this problem known

5. Do not wait for permission, start solving the problem now

Unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as it sounds.

1. Reclaim your nervous system and attention

Most of us are no longer in control of our own thoughts. We’re taking in too much outside information and it’s throwing off our internal compass.

I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t know in step one but if you don’t take this one seriously then steps two to five will be useless.

Unlike some people may have you believe, there is no grand conspiracy to keep you sedated, distracted and feeling scared. I feel confident in saying this because I have met many of the founders who are building the next generation of technology. Most are normal(ish) human beings who set out with good intentions. Over time those intentions change to optimize for profits over purpose because that is what capitalism does. That is the system we operate under, without growth, it does not function.

This is important to highlight because I see many people who have become totally disillusioned with the world which has led to hopelessness. But when we blame problems on some invisible force, we give away our agency. And you are going to need all of your personal agency to navigate this new world.

What happens in reality is someone builds a new technology, we unleash it without thinking of the long term consequences, people adopt it with enthusiasm because it promises efficiency/ distraction, our human nature cannot get enough and so the technology accelerates in a way that provides more and more efficiency and distraction.

If you want to go deep on how I think you can prepare against this, you can do so here:

Today we are going to focus on personal agency and how you can operate within the current system as it is. Hopefully if we unlock the new generation’s ambition, they can help us build a better system.

It’s not fair that the onus is on you as the individual to navigate a world that you did not set up but that is the reality of where we are at.

In order to think clearly enough to move on to step two, you must get separation from the distraction machines.

Anything that has an infinite scroll, auto-play, personalized recommendation feeds, push notifications, short-form video loops, streak, likes, reactions or any social validation metrics is not your friend.

But you know this already.

What you might not know, since you grew up with these things being part of everyday life, is how your nervous system/body/mind can feel like without them.

I’m thirty four, and before this last year, I also forgot what it was like to have a normal dopamine baseline and not be completely addicted to a screen. And I happened to grow up before the explosion of smartphones so I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to get some separation when it’s all you have ever known.

I separated myself for an entire year. I’m here to tell you that with separation, everything (including your emotions) get easier to manage and your ability to think both critically and creatively will explode.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration when I say that it’s a matter of life and death that you regain control over your nervous system and attention from devices. The part of you that finds joy in the small things, that can create beauty at will and can navigate all the challenges life throws at you, that part may die, if you don’t fight back.

It almost did for me.

But there is hope, you are not broken. You are not beyond repair. Quite the opposite, you are absolutely teeming with untapped potential just waiting to be released when you stop giving that potential to meaningless mechanisms.

To make this actionable:

1. Have a plan before you engage, unconscious consumption is the enemy. Treat your phone and laptop like it is alcohol. Many young people seem to have a healthier relationship to alcohol than my generation ever did. I don’t drink anymore but there was a time where alcohol had some social benefit in my life, just like technology does. But if you don’t go into the evening with a plan ie. I’m going to have two drinks at the party then it can easily get away from you. Same with your phone/screens. You need to set hard limits.

2. Remember when you engage with distraction technology, you are spending your happiness and motivation chemicals. You only have a finite amount of these brain chemicals each day so ask yourself, is this really where I want to spend them?

3. Build a daily practice that replenishes these motivation and happiness chemicals. Motivation to do hard things is earned, you cannot just will yourself into tackling the challenges in your life. Guard this daily practice with your life, everything else flows from it. Block one hour a day and build a routine that works for you but it must include: stillness, silence, movement, breath and nature. Play around with it until you find one that you look forward to every day.

Be patient with yourself.

Step one is the real game that you must master in life. I spend most of my time thinking about how I can get better at balancing my mind/body/soul so that I feel connected to myself and the world around me. It is an ongoing process that never ends. You will find that when you feel connected, life begins to unfurl in front of you with a lot less effort.

2. Find a big problem that you feel passionate about solving

Now that you have some separation from things that drain your passion. You must begin to pay attention to the things that make you feel most alive. Deep interest creates long-term resilience. Genuine curiosity becomes your advantage over the long-haul.

People who are deeply interested in a problem naturally spend more time thinking about it, learning about it, experimenting with it and connecting with others who care about it.

When I ask most young people what they want to do, most don’t know the answer. They will usually say that they want to make a lot of money as quickly as possible and then stop working.

I get it. I was also under the same delusion for a long time.

But then I will ask, what would you like to do after that now that you have all this free time?

Most do not know how to answer this either. Or if they do, they mention a bunch of distractions that will get old very quickly. And here is where the bigger problem lies.

We know that we want to escape the current system, we know we want a lot of money but we have no idea what to do with our lives once we escape. This is common among all age brackets.

For many years, jobs were looked at as a means to an end. Maybe our parents worked a nine-five job that paid them well enough that they could live meaningful lives outside of their work. They worked so they could live later, either on the weekends or in retirement. This paradigm is actively breaking down.

Jobs, as we have known them in the past, are no longer sources of stability. Most of them also demand our attention almost twenty-four seven since we are now always connected. So increasingly there is no time to do the actual living part.

On top of that, we have unleashed technology that will quickly do more and more of the job functions that were once done by humans, making these jobs even less stable and more demanding. Sounds bleak.

The good news?

Yes, there is a lot of fear around job loss these days but when I look around I see so much work to be done.

We have to reframe how we think about our careers.

Where there is work to be done, problems to be solved, there is an opportunity to make a livelihood. So what kind of work would you like to spend your life doing?

Not as a form of escape, not as a means to just pay your bills but what change would you really like to see in the world?

It goes back to the question, if you had all the money in the world already and you escaped the system, what would you spend your life doing?

That is the thread you should follow. That is where you will find meaning.

There are virtually unlimited problems to be solved, here is a non-exhaustive list to get you thinking:

• The loneliness epidemic

• Digital addiction

• Elder care and a better way to grow old

• Guidance for the next generation

• Cities need to be rebuilt in harmony with nature

• Energy grids need to be rebuilt/rethought

• local communities need to be repaired

• A trades/apprenticeship revival

• Attention restoration

• Protecting children from addictive systems

• Long-form human-thinking platforms

• Preventative healthcare

• Health access inequality

• Clean energy

• Biodiversity preservation

• Heat adaptation infrastructure (global temperatures rising)

• Sustainable cities

• Circular economies

• Affordable housing

• Community-oriented architecture

• AI safety/governance

• Truth infrastructure

• Preservation of human agency

• Better public discourse

• Trustworthy journalism

• Meaningful storytelling

• Modern spiritual communities

• Parenting support systems

• Intergenerational gathering

• Modern friendship/dating infrastructure

• Re-skilling displaced workers

• Financial inclusion

• Ethical capitalism and new systems of commerce

• Meditation accessibility

• Modern philosophy communities

• Translating ancient wisdom for modern life

• Helping people navigate suffering/grief

• Consciousness research

• Soil regeneration

• Planet restoration

• Water infrastructure

• Supply chain resilience

• Cybersecurity

• Disaster preparedness

• Food distribution

I could go on and on, the list is endless. If you picked any one of these and deeply devoted your time/attention to them, I believe you could build a meaningful career that would provide the capital and resources to live a comfortable life.

To make this actionable:

1. Forget about asking yourself What job do I want? and lean into What problem would feel meaningful to dedicate my life to? Now, of course, you can change your mind as you grow and learn more about yourself. But take the time to pick something that you know will interest you for at least the next five years. Learning compounds so switching too often will set you back.

2. Do not get stuck in over-analysis. Picking one problem may lead you to finding out about another one that suits you more (again, try not to jump too often but it’s okay to change your mind). Continually keep yourself educated on the problem you choose and adjacent problems around it. Education is changing, you must fall in love with learning to succeed in the future. Read widely from many different sources. Physical books are your friend.

Much of the advice you will receive about your career, particularly around linear career paths, will come from a good place but it is outdated. The world that our parents grew up in no longer exists.

Step 3: Aquire the skills needed to have an impact on that problem

I like to think that problems want to be solved. They are just waiting there for the right person (or group of people) to come along and figure out a solution for them.

The problem is you are likely unworthy of solving that problem…yet. The problem doesn’t want you to solve it right now because you have not acquired the skills you will need to do so.

This is where you will need some self-awareness.

The self-awareness to do an honest self assessment on the skills you have today and the skills you will need in the future to be capable of solving that problem. And the understanding that skills take time to learn and foster.

What have people told you that you’re naturally good at?

Are you creative? Do you naturally fall into a leadership role? Do you like building systems? Are you good at organizing people? Do you feel more technically skilled than most? Are you a builder? Are you good at selling ideas? Are you good at creating an audience? Can you grasp abstract ideas?

In order for this problem to be solved, it needs people that have all sorts of different skills. You don’t need to learn them all. Understand and lean into your strengths.

Let’s take a random example of a problem: Old people loneliness

This seems like a big, juicy, worthwhile problem to tackle.

This is an over-simplification but In order to effectively solve old people loneliness you would need to understand the problem (critical thinking and empathy), you would need to come up with a potential solution (creative thinking), you would need to build the solution (judgement, taste, technical aptitude), you would need to test the solution (patience, strong communication skills), you would need to market the solution (creativity, writing, marketing knowledge), you want need to sell the solution (sales, presentation and interpersonal skills), you would need to build a team (leadership and recruiting), you would need to motivate and guide that team (people management), you would need to figure out how to make money (financial literacy), you would need to deploy the solution (organizational and problem solving skills) and then you would need to scale that solution (building systems and process).

Just in that one example it requires people that have:

• The ability to critically think

• Empathy

• The ability to creatively think

• Taste

• Judgement

• Technical aptitude

• Patience

• Strong communication

• Creativity

• Writing skills

• Marketing knowledge

• Sales skills

• Presentation skills

• Interpersonal skills

• Leadership ability

• The ability to recruit others

• The ability to manage others

• Financial literacy

• Organizationals skills

• Problem solving skills

• The ability to build systems and process

All of the above are learned skills, learned skills that are very human. Again, you do not need to learn them all but you do need to get really good at four or five of them. Of course depending on the problem you choose, it might require a completely different set of skills.

Yes, you can learn the above skills yourself online via research, newsletters, courses, videos, etc but the best way to learn is by doing them day in and day out. This is where you may have to swallow your pride for a short period of time and go into an environment that may not perfectly map to the problem that you are passionate about. That’s ok. Life is longer than you think, you have time.

Think of this environment as an extension of your schooling/education. You are there to learn skills in order to make yourself into the person that can be an asset to a group that is focused on the real mission you want to serve.

To make it actionable:

1. To the best of your ability, try to map out what skills that are required to solve the problem you have decided to dedicate your time to. Ask the people around you what you are naturally good at. Find the cross section between what you are good at and what skills the problem needs. Highlight four or five and go all in on those.

2. There is plenty of volunteer work out there where you can learn all types of skills. Take control of your own learning, do what you can online but you must also get real world experience to build true skills. A lot of what holds us back is our ego and thinking that we ‘are above’ certain types of work, you must get out of your own way. You do not have to stay in the environment forever, you are there on a mission to try to learn as much as you can.

I want this to be pragmatic advice and it is unrealistic to think that you can spend your life helping to solve meaningful problems before you have any meaningful skills. Skills move forward with you in life so slowing down to properly learn them is never wasted time.

Step 4: Make your passion about this problem known to the world

You now have a clear mind, you have a problem that you want to spend the next portion of your live solving, you’re on your way to acquiring the skills that make you valuable to this problem, now you need to tell the world about your intentions.

For better or worse, we live in a world that is largely driven by the attention economy. The same one that we had to escape in step one in order to see and think clearly.

Here is where we cautiously re-enter that world but now we flip the script. Instead of being a consumer, we begin to create and document our learnings about this problem.

The problem, and the people currently focused on that problem, need to know that you exist. It starts small but you need to make a declaration to the world that for the foreseeable future much of your time/energy will be dedicated to learning all you can about this problem.

Every problem has hundreds, thousands or millions of other people who are also interested in it. Find those people. Start to follow those people. Start to learn from those people. But also start to formulate your own point of view. Then begin to share that point of view.

It could be through your favorite social media platform, it could be by writing highly technical whitepapers, it could be interviewing people on a little podcast or video series, it could be a newsletter, it could be creating a small in-person group in your community, decide what fits your style, you just need to signal to the world that this is your lane.

As you share your point of view with the world, it’s okay to be a beginner. It’s okay to not be an expert yet. What you are doing is leaving behind little beacons for other people that are also interested in this problem to find you.

The world does not owe you anything. It will not be an easy path to making this problem your life’s work. It will take a lot of effort, day in and day out. You will have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. You will have to show up at events for your problem, you will have to show up in online communication about your problem, you will have to try to get the attention of others solving that problem.

Here is what I want you to know:

The people that have been working on this problem for the last ten, fifteen or twenty-five years desperately want to help you. They want nothing more than to know that there is another generation of ambitious, young people who care about this problem. People want to help you.

To make this actionable:

1. Map out your network, your parent’s network, your friend’s network, everyone that you can possibly think of where you have some connectivity. See if there is anyone in that network who is actively working on the problem you are passionate about. Make a list. If there are no names on that list, do research online and come up with twenty names of people who have dedicated their lives to that problem.

2. Once you have the list, send each person a custom email/DM, something like:

“Hi (name) -

I’ve been studying your work around ‘x problem’. It gives me hope that there are people like you that have dedicated their life to a mission like ‘x problem’. I am early in my career and still have much to learn but it is clear to me that I would like to spend this next chapter of my life focusing solely on helping with ‘x problem’. What advice would you have for a young person who wants to get involved? Would you be open to an in-person or digital coffee sometime in the coming weeks? I’ll come prepared.

I’m early in my journey but eager to learn.

(Your name)”

If you send a version of that to twenty people, I would be shocked if at least two or three didn’t respond.

3. Meet them, come prepared, be curious. Tell them about the skills you think are needed to help and validate your assumption with them. Ask for their advice on the best way to build the skills needed to help solve the problem. See if there is any opportunity to volunteer, work or learn from them. If not, see if there is anyone else they think would be valuable for you to meet. Repeat from step one until opportunities start appearing.

Step 5: Start solving the problem

Your attention is flowing where it should, you know what your life’s mission is (at least for now), you are building skills that will help serve that mission, you have made your mission known to the world and you’ve started to build a network around that mission.

Now you must go out and start solving the problem.

Congratulations, you now have a job solving the problem you’re passionate about!

At this point, you’re just missing the earn money part. That’s ok, that can and will come later if you remain patient.

You might not be very good at solving it to begin with but you can solve it in the best way you know how.

Let’s go back to our original example of a problem: old people loneliness

Right now, you don’t need some big, sophisticated solution to solve this. What you could do is go to your local old folk’s home and volunteer to chat or play board games with some elderly people.

As you do that week in and week out, you are going to notice how old folk’s homes operate, what the elderly really need to feel connected, the lack of funding and why this problem has fallen through the cracks. Over time, a better solution may start forming in your head.

Perhaps you realize that you have limited time so you recruit other young people who need volunteer hours to join you on a given afternoon, what if you started sharing your learnings more online, maybe you expand your little volunteer group to another old folks home, you could ask people for donations so you could incentivize more young people to join you and now things are starting to snowball a little. Down the line this gets the attention of some bigger non-profits in the area or a tech founder building an app for grandparents who now both want to talk to you becuase of your hands on experience.

Now, this is just a fictitious scenario but one that I believe is rooted in reality. When you get out into the world and start doing things, the universe reacts. Every action has a reaction. The more action you take, the more reaction comes your way.

Action creates surface area for opportunity.

An important note:

I am aware that we need money in order to live.

This five step process is to set you up for a meaningful life in the long term. This way of living and thinking is similar to that of an artist. An artist gives themselves completely to their art and makes sacrifices in order to do that. To them, their art is their life. It means enough to them that they are willing to forgo certain comforts and pleasures in order to continue doing the thing they love. Same goes with working on a problem that you’re deeply passionate about. It takes time and sacrifice in the short-term. You may need to stay at home longer (if available to you), you may need to work another job that is less aligned as you work towards your mission and you may not be able to afford all of the luxuries you want right away.

But what you are building is resilience. Nobody can take your passion about your problem away from you, nobody can fire you from your problem and your knowledge of this problem will start to compound over time. And, most importantly, you may start to find deep meaning in your work. I promise you, that with enough time, you will find that is more valuable than money.

I also don’t want you to think that I’m telling you to not make money. You can become wildly successful and rich by solving meaningful problems. Money follows problem solvers around. If you get good at solving problems, money will chase you down wherever you go. But make money/success a byproduct of a life spent solving a problem that lights your soul on fire.

That’s the best kind of money there is.

To make it actionable:

1. Ask yourself: What is the smallest action I can take that helps to solve the problem I’m passionate about? Then go do that.

2. Collect data on all of your small actions. Use this data to look for ways that you can make a slightly bigger impact on the problem every few months.

3. As you solve it more and more times, map out who cares about having this problem solved. Who is benefiting from this problem being solved? That is likely where your money will come from.

The big secret is that you do not have to wait for permission to start solving a problem. You can just do it, like right now.

A few footnotes worthy of inclusion:

Learn how AI actually works

There’s no escaping it, use it, understand it. Like every technology cycle, people who understand new tools early gain asymmetric leverage. Do not outsource your thinking to AI but use it to amplify your thinking.

Soft skills matter more than ever

The value of pure intelligence, memory and analysis is going down. Things like judgment, emotional regulation, courage, creativity, discernment, storytelling and adaptability are going up. Focus on the latter.

Distribution matters as much as skill

Even the best problem solvers need to reach the people they are solving the problem for. If you do not build up distribution channels that you own, you will have a much harder time finding success.

Trust is more valuable than ever

Everyone is trying to sell you a shortcut. The cost of shortcuts is usually trust or your future ability/skill. Speed is not the same thing as progress. Protect your personal integrity at all costs.

I have a lot of hope for this next generation. A generation that was raised to consume may just be the generation that finally fights back and creates a better future for all.

The future needs people who can still feel deeply, think clearly, work meaningfully, and help other humans navigate an increasingly artificial world.

I do not have all of the answers. I’m still trying to figure this out myself.

But recently, I have oriented my life around solving meaningful problems because the meaning I derive from my work creates resilience, adaptability, a continuous learning loop and long-term motivation in an unstable world.

Meaning is where I have found my stability.

And that stability is available to all of us, if we commit to searching for it.

latest.podcast.episode

In my latest episode of the Wake Up Call podcast I sit down with one of my dearest friends, a brother, my new business partner and the co-founder of Enfold, .

We go deep on doing hard things, remembering who you are and sharing that gift with the world. You can listen to the whole episode here.

Please support our partners (they are doing incredible work in the world)

Dreamfuel: The leading mental performance coaching platform for technology teams. As a Wake Up Call subscriber, you are eligible for a free 1-1 or team coaching session.

Enfold: Five days can change the course of your life forever. If you mention Wake Up Call, your application will be prioritized.

RealQuest: It can be impossible to pull kids from screens, at least have them invest that time into their future. Gamify building a real business and solving real world problems.

Thank you for reading until the end.

I hope that this did not come off in anyway as preachy, that was not my intention. This advice comes from a sincere look back at my own life and an earnest reflection into where humanity is currently at.

If this was helpful, please share it so that more people can find it who may need to read it.

And like I mentioned earlier, my generation and the generations before me got us into this strange set of affairs so it’s unlikely we’ll be the ones to have the answers.

But I have hope that you just might.

All love,

Scott Barker

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

Welcome to edition #17 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How we must adapt old systems and stories for an accelerated world

2. What those new stories could look like across community, ritual, culture, philosophy and religion

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, acceleration and modern ambition. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.

This is the third essay in a series of articles about the upcoming Acceleration Decade.

I spend almost every day thinking about the future, where we might be heading, why so many are struggling, how we might prepare and how we can get back to a hopeful vision for humanity.

In my first essay I outlined how technology is accelerating beyond our capacity and how we might begin to prepare ourselves.

In my second essay I wrote about how humanity as a whole is struggling to metabolize all of this rapid change, in part because the psychological enzymes that we have historically used to make sense of change are breaking down.

In this essay, I will begin the difficult task of positing some news stories and systems that may aid us in transmuting this change into a better world for all. It’s a ridiculous endeavour to embark on but I’m going to try.

The aim with all my writing is not to outline the answers but to get people thinking about the topic, start a conversation and help spark some new questions.

If you find this essay or series helpful, think about giving it a like or a share so that it can reach those who may need to read it as well.

Anyway, let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind

Things, as they are, do not seem to be working.

If we don’t consciously start to take part in building the future we want, we will wake up one day and not recognize the world we inhabit.

Right now all of the societal changes that are taking place are driven by corporations inventing new technology. That technology then influences society and the world around us. I believe we have it backwards and that is a big reason that we’re experiencing so many growing pains.

Technology is not serving society, Society is serving Technology.

In this paradigm, I do not think it is possible to realize the Utopian future that is still on the table (at least not for all of us). We need to flip it back. And if the old systems cannot process all of this change, we need new ones.

We don’t just want to cope with the upcoming acceleration. We need to redesign how we live, individually and collectively, in order to metabolize rapid, relentless change.

Last essay, I talked about the psychological enzymes that humans have historically relied on to make sense of the world are weakening. This week, I want to talk about what could replace or update them.

A reminder that the goal here is not to slow down the world. We can slow down our individual lives, which I think is of critical importance, but we cannot fight against the coming tide. Instead we need to increase our capacity to live in a world that never stops changing.

Five systems that we need to rebuild (with urgency)

These five systems are not separate. They work together.

When one weakens, the others have to carry more weight. When all five weaken at once, change becomes almost impossible to metabolize.

1. Community

Where did our communities go? Why don’t we know our neighbours anymore?

As everything shifted online, we over-indexed on getting our sense of community in the digital world. At first, it felt nice. You could find people all over the world that actually shared your exact interests. It felt good, people finally understood you! The problem is that digital communities cannot adequately support you when you’re in crisis, they cannot help you raise your kids and they do a poor job at challenging the way you see the world (echo chambers).

As we poured more and more energy into those communities, we had little time/energy left for the real relationships that were all around us. At our local coffee shop, out on our daily walk, etc. We fell for the same trap humans often fall for. More must be better. The more connections we had, the better…right?

We went for scale, for audience, for followers. For the most part, this was a failed experiment. We must move back to smaller, deeper more intentional communities. When we allow space for smaller circles, more intimate groups then we unlock a true sense of shared meaning-making.

Two things I have adopted recently to foster more intimate connections:

1. Every day at 4:30pm my phone alarm goes off, I then look at a list I have made of the ten most important people in my life. I reach out to one of them. It can be a call, a text or a quick hug (or conversation) if they are around me.

2. I stick to more of a routine and actually engage with the humans that are part of that routine/world. ie. I have a new community center that I’ve been swimming laps at every morning and I actually know the older ladies that swim beside me (they are seventy plus and kick my ass in the pool).

A tight community helps us give meaning to all of the change. And we can distribute the psychological burden of change across our trusted group.

2. Rituals

Many of our modern rituals are in place to help us optimize. We were sold the idea that there was nothing wrong with society, we were the ones that were broken. And we were all only ever one ritual away from being optimized enough to handle it all.

As a former optimization-addict, I can tell you that there is no end to that game. In my eyes, the answer lies in Integration Rituals rather than more optimization. There is no sense in layering on more things on your crowded to-do list when you haven’t had time to even make sense of your current human experience.

Here are a few helpful rituals that you can introduce into your own life:

1. One day of silence per week

2. Weekly reflections with your closest friends/family

3. Technology ‘sabbaths’, no tech on a given day

4. Transition rituals between stages of life

Rituals help us understand who we are. Without ritual, change accumulates without meaning.

3. Culture

Our culture used to play a key role in slowing down change. It would reinforce shared beliefs/understanding and pump the brakes on changes that were outside of those, like a filter it would accept/reject new changes. It also created some continuity between generations.

Somewhere along the way, our culture stopped doing all of those things. The dominating story in our culture is that speed and progress are the only way things get better. That we would somehow accelerate our way into a better world. The whole ‘move fast and break things’ ideology that started in Silicon Valley seeped into everyday life.

We need to reintroduce friction deliberately.

This may be one of the biggest challenges we face. This is not easy to do. In our capitalist world, friction is seen as the enemy to progress. But I believe it is a feature, not a bug.

There are many areas in our systems that have intentional friction baked into them. If you want to sell a drug to millions of people, you first must get it rigorously tested by the FDA before it is allowed to be consumed. We decided that it was worth slowing down our medical advancement to ensure we didn’t unleash something that harmed or killed on a mass scale. Is it insane to think that we would do the same with consumer technology?

We now live in a world where someone can ‘vibe-code’ an app on Monday, create a viral marketing plan on Tuesday, push a paid digital advertising campaign on Wed and have it in the hands of millions of users by Thursday…with next to zero oversight.

There are now many studies on the negative effects of social media on children, there’s already early research on AI usage lowering IQ. How do we know what technology is harming or helping us?

We also need to de-couple culture from technology, it feels like the new Church-State paradigm. And no, this is not just a technological problem. The volume/speed over depth trade is widespread everywhere. It shows up in the content we consume, the books we read, the movies we watch.

I don’t believe we want a world where creativity is a volume game. If we want beautiful art and writing in our culture, we must reward depth over volume and be okay with slower creative cycles.

We reward that depth with our wallets and our attention. In a world driven by algorithms, our attention is the most valuable asset we all have right now in shaping culture.

4. Philosophy

New philosophy tends to rise when society loses its shared orientation. It gives people helpful frameworks for interpreting new realities before institutions know how to respond. We desperately need philosophers again.

Even the big AI companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic have all recently hired notable philosophers to tackle AI safety, consciousness, human-AI relationships and design. But this feels like the tail wagging the dog. The same systems creating the acceleration/instability are now trying to solve the downstream psychological/philosophical consequences of the acceleration they profit from. It’s better than nothing but we cannot rely on this to genuinely help society in any meaningful way.

This is the main purpose behind my writing is to encourage and inspire others to think deeply about the problem we face. They are not going away. And perhaps some of the solutions are sitting in your head (yes you, the one reading this right now!). I am not smart or arrogant enough to think that I can come up with a solution to this acceleration myself, but collectively I know we can.

I know it feels overwhelming to spend time dissecting the world, who are we to think we could actually make a difference? We can and we must.

You do not have to get too academic with it or try to figure out how to change everything about the world overnight but what you can do is start with yourself. You can create your own framework for meaning and your own view on the world. That is how this all started with me. I went on a journey to understand myself better and if you walk that path long enough, you have to start to analyze the world around you. We are relational beings, we do not live in a vacuum.

If you think long and deeply about how you are going to process change and live a happier, healthier life, you may just stumble upon ideas that can help change the world.

5. Religion/Spirituality

Uh oh.

Trigger word. Trigger topic. Trigger everything.

I am not here to challenge anyone’s religious belief. I accept and have directly learned/taken lessons from just about every religion that I know of. All religions are filled with beautiful wisdom and teachings that should be embraced.

It’s also true that in much of the developed world, organized religion is losing its grip. Globally, the picture is more nuanced. Religion is certainly not disappearing. But the shared religious structures that once helped our societies process change are weakening (in many of the places that are driving this mass acceleration).

Historically, Religion/Spirituality helped us process change through narrative stability and by providing us with answers that went beyond our current change and suffering.

You see many people embrace God when they go through traumatic events outside of their control. When nothing makes sense, if you believe in God, God is still there, no matter what. That anchor is actually very helpful. It allows us to identify with something beyond our immediate circumstances.

So how can we encourage people to foster some of those really positive benefits that come from religion without all of the dogma attached to them?

For me it was helpful to move past doctrine and embrace practice.

You do not have to believe in a Christian God in order to pray. You do not have to believe the Buddha in order to meditate. You do not have to believe in Allah in order to fast.

We all must believe in something. Only you can figure out what that something is for you.

And maybe, for you, that something is nothing. But if it is nothing then make it The Great Nothing. And spend time each day thinking of The Great Nothing.

Even time spent in silence, meditation, reflection and presence revering The Great Nothing is time well spent. Because if you really quiet the mind and connect, you will realize how wondrous, beautiful, chaotic and insane this big great nothing really is. And how small our little, human problems really are. Then all of this change feels a lot less overwhelming.

I broke these into individual sections but, again, these all must work together.

Community is where meaning is shared. But community needs ritual to stay alive.
Rituals repeated over time become culture. Culture is shaped by philosophy (the ideas people believe about what life is for). And philosophy often points toward spirituality (the deeper orientation beneath the ideas).

The work is not to revive each pillar in isolation, but to understand how the reinforce each other. I believe that by examining these five pillars and continuing to reimagine them, we can begin to build a sort of infrastructure for our new accelerated world.

And yes, it also feels unfair to put the burden entirely on the individual to withstand a system they did not design. But that’s where we are. That’s where it starts at least.

With each of us adopting new practices while we slowly re-build and re-imagine the psychological enzymes that help us transmute this change into a better future for all.

If we do not rise to the occasion, we will see a deeper fragmentation across society, synthetic meaning starting to replace real meaning and increased dependence on external regulation (AI, drugs, virtual reality).

This next decade does not have to be defined by technology alone. We can write a new definition. Humanity could look back at this period of time as one of hope, agency and collective responsibility.

As the time when we faced our biggest challenge yet and rose to the occasion. When we did the hard work of rebuilding broken systems, writing new stories and creating a world that fully embraced what it means to be human, for all humans.

That is within the realm of possibility, and I believe it starts with you.

latest.podcast.episode

In my latest episode of the Wake Up Call I ramble to myself. It’s a solo episode where I reflect on my own personal journey and talk about my next chapter.

You can check out the full episode here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Please support our partners (they are all doing incredible work in the world)

Dreamfuel - the leading mental performance coaching platform for technology teams. As a Wake Up Call subscriber, you are eligible for a free 1-1 or team coaching session.

Enfold - five days can change the course of your life forever. If you mention Wake Up Call, your application will be prioritized.

Second Harvest - a community for accomplished people ready to find clarity & connection in their next chapter. Check out their upcoming Summit in Lincoln, MA.

Thank you for being here and taking the time to read this.

I encourage everyone to get involved in the conversation in the comments. I try my best to respond to each and every one (even if it takes me a little time).

And if you found this valuable at all, please think about giving it a like, a comment or a share so that it may find some others who may need to read it.

All love,

Scott Barker

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

🌓

🌔

Welcome to edition #16 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. A thought experiment & two simple questions that changed my life

2. A personal story & announcement that has been six years in the making

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, acceleration and modern ambition. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.

This essay is a personal one. I will continue my series of writing on The Acceleration Decade after this edition.

You haven’t heard from me in a while. I took a little break from publishing. I could feel myself starting to write for an audience, rather than writing to understand myself/the world better so I hit pause.

A little pause to take my own (and Brad’s) advice to slow down, touch grass and challenge myself to create, contribute & love from an authentic place again.

There has also been a lot of exciting changes in my life that have taken up more of my time. I wrapped up my five months in India with a ten day silent retreat, meditating for ten hours a day.

It’s been a whole year now that I’ve been on the road with my backpack looking for ways to live a happier, healthier, more meaningful life.

During this last stint, I got really clear on everything. Perhaps the most clear I have ever felt in my life.

I now know how I want to spend this next phase of my life. I’m excited to share how I got there. It took a long time but I finally have an answer to the question:

What’s next?

Let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind

It’s been just over a year since I left everything I know behind.

And every morning for at least the last nine months I have written the same two questions in my journal:

1. Who shall I be today?

2. What shall I do today?

Two ridiculously simple questions. The simplicity masks how powerful these questions really are. Within that pair of five words lies almost all of our human agency.

They are perhaps the most personal questions that you can ask yourself.

Who do I want to be in this life? How do I want to spend my short amount of time on earth?

But framed as they are above, these questions strip away any fantasies of the future. It’s not about building yourself into the perfect version of yourself. It’s not about building the perfect life in the future.

It’s about today. It’s about right now. The only moment that ever really exists.

There are many things we cannot control in life. Right now we feel that more than ever but these two things are very much in our control (even when they feel like they are not). This is what every human has autonomy over.

Every day, you wake up and you get to decide who you want to be on that given day. Yes, you must battle against all your neurosis, the experiences that shaped your view of the world, your negative habits but on any day you can choose to be something different. That is within the realm of possibility for each of us.

And every day, you wake up and you also get to decide what you want to do on that given day. Now, as adults, we have responsibilities to our loved ones, we have jobs that pay us to be there and a myriad of other things we feel as if we must do. But the reality is, you don’t have to do any of those things. You get to decide where each minute goes.

In my former life as a venture capitalist and tech executive, I could not see the freedom I held in my being and doing. It felt as if my personality/sense of self was already set and I had to make due with who I was. And it felt like I had built a life so big that my responsibilities and task list were set weeks in advance. I just had to find a way to somehow get through each day. I was a prisoner in my own life. Eventually that way of living made me sick.

But we are not bystanders in our own lives. Just because we’ve set ourselves on a path, does not mean we need to see it through to the very end.

I went as far as I could in the world of performance and success…and it broke in a way that required a lot of space and deep tools to fix.

I do not believe everyone has to take the dramatic and drastic steps I took to change my life but it was necessary for me.

Only once I stepped down from the fund, sold everything and slowed my life way down could I create space to focus on answering those questions from a place of wholeness. I’ve circled around those two questions again and again. I’ve likely clocked over one hundred hours of meditation/contemplation on them.

One of the things I noticed is how much longer it took for me to see/feel clearly again. We’re always in a rush to reinvent ourselves but the truth is, if you shift too quickly then you’ll just be taking all your old frameworks with you into your new world.

I’ll share my answer below in hopes that they make you think of your own.

Who shall I be?

I would like to be someone who is deeply connected to themselves and the natural world around them. Someone who has enough peace and equanimity in his daily life to seek truth and express that truth. A man who has the courage to take action to help create a better future for all. And one who chooses love over fear as often as they can.

*I tweak my answer slightly each day to suit the particular set of events/tasks I have ahead. Some days I need more peace, others more courage. We are much more malleable than we think.

What shall I do?

I would like to spend my life transforming fear/pain into love/passion through creation and action. And helping others close the gap between their external world and internal reality.

*I’m aware that sounds corny but I have tried many, many times to re-word it in a way that doesn’t make everyone roll their eyes but I can’t…so we’re stuck with it. I think I’m ok with being corny these days.

How do I keep myself accountable for being the human I want to be and doing the things I was called to do when life starts moving fast?

I keep it dead simple. I run a simple thought experiment at the end of each day.

Every day you choose who you want to be. In part, you become that person through the actions you take which leads me to the doing part.

This clarity around what I want to do was crystallized for me last October during my time at a 5-MeO-DMT Retreat and since then I have been looking for ways I can serve that mission.

The whole idea behind this newsletter and my podcast is to help people wake-up before their wake-up call ie. realize what’s important in life before it’s too late. I will continue writing and sharing my thoughts but somehow that did not feel like enough.

I want to get my hands dirty and build again. That sent me down many rabbit holes, mapping out the different businesses I could create next in service of that mission. Part of that was taking stock of all the things that had helped me on my own personal journey.

What helped me transform my own fear or pain into love and passion?

Many things came to mind: long treks in nature, the silence in monasteries, the stillness at ashrams, the learnings from yoga retreats, the wisdom found in ancient scriptures, time spent in community.

It all worked but it also felt disjointed and I couldn’t figure out how to connect it all.

But there was one place that kept coming up in my mind that encapsulated it all. A place that felt like home.

the.big.announcement

This place is a beautiful sanctuary called Enfold on a little island in BC, Canada run by two incredible humans and dear, dear friends.

This place had felt like home for a long time and I knew that it felt like home for thousands of others too.

At first I thought, what if I could build something like Enfold?

They were a living, breathing example of helping transform fear/pain into love/passion.

…but hold on, let’s rewind the tape for a second. It’s a bit of a crazy story.

I first ended up at Enfold quite serendipitously about six years ago. A good friend of mine actually gifted me the experience of going to one of their retreats.

It is a five day process that uses psychedelics, coaching, and various therapies to help you awaken to your life again. To access parts of you that you thought you lost long ago and unlock the dormant answers within.

Their core offering involves 5-MeO-DMT (the strongest psychedelic known to mankind) but the medicine itself is really only part of the process. It is a tool within a structured environment and part of a broader system of transformation.

To say this had a profound impact on my life would be an understatement. I had been on the path for a few years by then but I had yet to witness a container like this before. It was a magical place that felt like it was from another planet, yet the people leading it were very much grounded in this reality. They did not take themselves too seriously, they laughed often, loved to come up with crazy business ideas (like me), they were never preachy and had incredibly full, successful lives before being called to this work.

It was deeply spiritual work, but grounded. Real. Not performative.

The two founders, Steve Rio and Austin Austin, would end up becoming very important in my life.

That first experience gave me a glimpse behind the veil. A glimpse into what source, unconditional love and faith feels like. And for a while, everything made sense.

Unfortunately like all humans, I am very forgetful. Even when I learn the most important lessons of my life, I have this way of forgetting them as time passes. I actually have a tattoo around my knee that says: Life is just a series of remembering.

I went back to my incredibly demanding life but something had shifted inside of me. I could see the masks/characters that I put on in different parts of my life. When it was time to be VC guy, time to be sales guy, time to be dinner host, time to be fun/party guy. None of them felt like the real me.

But, like any good high-performer, I have my black belt in compartmentalization so I pushed those thoughts below the surface and doubled down on outward success. If I achieved enough then I could buy back my time and rediscover the real me again in the future…that was the plan.

Those next five years were far and away the most ‘successful’ years of my life. I co-founded and built a VC fund from scratch, grew a community of the best tech execs on the planets, invested in hundreds of incredible founders, bought/built a media company and raised one hundred million dollars.

For much of it, I was miserable, anxious and depressed.

The reality is all of that ‘success’ had a cost. The cost was being completely disconnected from my mind, body and soul. My engagement fell apart, all of my friendships were strained since I was never around, I rarely saw my family, I had to give up my best pal (my cat) due to too much work travel, I ended up in the ER with an stress-induced ulcer, I was taking pills to focus, more pills to sleep and drinking daily just to try find some peace.

In the middle of that period, I hit what I thought was rock bottom at the time. After staying late at the office (again), I came home to find my fiance at the time waiting in the living room, she wanted to ‘take a break’, this completely blindsided me and with my stress-levels already through the roof, I did not take it well. I called some friends and for the next forty-eight hours proceeded to numb myself every possible way I knew how. Drugs. Alcohol. Gambling. You name it. It was not pretty.

Eventually my body started giving up, I was having the darkest thoughts that one can have and I broke down. I did not know where to go. I did not know who to turn to. For some reason, the only place I wanted to go was Enfold. I was in the eye of the storm and needed some sort of anchor.

I called Steve knowing that it was a long shot. They were running retreats all the time that were booked up months and months in advance. I told him what was going on and he didn’t even hesitate when he said: “Get on the next ferry. I will pick you up. Stay as long as you need.”

As you’ve likely experienced, the world does not stop when you go through tough periods like. When it feels like your whole world is crashing down, the world just keeps moving. I needed a place where the world would stop for a second. They gave me that place.

I do not know how they did it. I’m sure they had to push guests into other dates or at the very least completely readjust all of their own plans that week. There was no medicine used that week but they created an environment for me to do the deepest unearthing, processing and healing that I’ve ever done in my life. I’ll never be able to repay the kindness and presence they showed me that week.

But it also dawned on me that this is just what they do, this was just a normal week for them, this is how they have chosen to spend their lives: helping others transmute their fear/pain into love.

After that week, I knew that one day I would like to find a way to do the same for others.

That felt like a far away fantasy though. It did not feel possible within the framework I was operating under so I went back to my old, very intense life but this time I stayed in that period of remembrance for much longer and my life slowly became more enjoyable again.

Fast forward another few years (because this story is getting too long) and I fall back into deeply rooted patterns of trying to over-achieve, self-sabotage, prove myself to anyone/everyone and chase the next big thing. Eventually I ran my body/mind into the ground again. It got bad. Really bad. Bad enough that I could no longer do it anymore. I could no longer play the character I was playing. This would be the last time.

That’s when I stepped down from the venture fund I co-founded, I sold my house (and everything in it), put what was left in a backpack and went to travel the world to try to figure out some better questions to ask.

I found them in the two, almost comically, simple questions above.

This fall, I travelled all the way back from Lombok, Indonesia to Enfold to participate in another ceremony (we actually filmed it and a documentary will be coming out at the end of the year). It was a much more challenging experience this time around but I came out with my answer to the second question.

Then over the course of the next few months, I figured out how I was going to bring my answer to life.

My thoughts switched from, what if I could build something like Enfold? to what if I put my ego aside and used everything that I’ve learned to support Enfold in their mission?

Now, looking back, the path here feels almost inevitable.

As of today, I am honoured and humbled to finally announce that I’ll be joining The Enfold Institute as a Partner and Managing Director.

This is not me completely leaving the world I came from behind, more like trying to help fix parts of what I saw was broken inside of it. It’s clear that a lot of the systems and stories we’ve relied on up until now are breaking down.

It’s an important period of time for: 1. modern health 2. the psychedelic space 3. humanity as a whole

Our modern health system is going through massive upheaval as people start to take their healing into their own hands.

Humanity is about to enter what I call The Acceleration Decade brought on by rapid advancements in technology.

And the psychedelic space is heading into, what Paul Austin calls, the Third Wave. This is a movement in psychedelics that is not anti-science like the 70s. And it’s not narrowly biomedical like the second wave in the 2010s.

You can read more about the mission behind Enfold, the Third Wave and our vision for the future, in this article (well worth the read).

The Enfolding

The Third Wave: Psychedelics, 5-MeO, and the Path Forward

There’s a feeling in the air right now that’s hard to name. AI is rewriting the world faster than most of us can metabolize. The us-vs-them mentality has metastasized into something that feels structural. Optimism is in short supply. People are exhausted, dysregulated, and quietly suspecting that the operating system humanity has been running on is no l…

Read more

3 months ago · 1 like · Steve Rio

It feels like it’s all converging and I want to be on the front lines.

The world faces many problems right now. And no, psychedelics are not the answer to all of them but they are a part of the solution.

Modern mental, physical and spiritual health is evolving rapidly. And it needs to. I believe our future depends on it.

Our inner collective consciousness must evolve in order to meet the growing challenges of our outer world.

We need happy, grounded and connected human beings in order to co-create a better future for all.

This is not another project for, this is not another job, this is not just another company, this work feels like what I was put on this earth to do.

latest.podcast.episode

In the following interview I sit down with Ian Koniak, a highly successful Founder/CEO, Coach and former #1 Enterprise Account Executive at Salesforce. Ian opens up about addiction, identity, integrity and the tension between who you are and who you are meant to be.

Ian shares what it took to break the cycle, rebuild trust and step into a life rooted in honesty and service.

You can listen to the full episode here.

Please support our partners (they are all doing incredible work in the world)

Dreamfuel - the leading mental performance coaching platform for technology teams. As a Wake Up Call subscriber, you are eligible for a free 1-1 or team coaching session.

Enfold - five days can change the course of your life forever. If you mention Wake Up Call, your application will be prioritized.

Second Harvest - a community for accomplished people ready to find clarity & connection in their next chapter. Check out their upcoming Summit in Lincoln, MA.

That’s it, thank you all for being on this journey with me. It’s been a wild one.

As of today, I guess this is my new career path:

1. College dropout

2. Bartender

3. Entrepreneur

4. Account Executive

5. Sales Manager

6. Business Development Rep, Tech

7. Business Development Team Lead, Tech

8. Business Development Manager, Tech

9. Head of Partnerships, Tech

10. Director, Strategic Engagement, Tech

11. Co-Founder + Partner, Venture Capital

12. Homeless backpacker, Advisor + Podcast Host

13. Managing Director + Partner, Psychedelic Institute

Career paths aren’t real, you’re never stuck, carve your own way, follow your heart. All the cliches are true.

All love,

Scott Barker

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #15 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. Why the Acceleration Decade is not merely a technological problem, the psychological cost of acceleration on the individual/the collective and an examination of potential antidotes.

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories exploring the psychology of meaning, acceleration and modern ambition. Each week I write one non-fiction essay for the mind or one fiction story for the soul.

I want to thank everyone for the response to my last essay. I have been flooded with beautiful comments and messages that I’m still getting through, please be patient with me. I hope to get back to each and every one.

Editor’s Note:

This is the second essay in a series I’ve been writing on the upcoming Acceleration Decade, the third essay goes into how we may begin to build new systems and write new stories:

My goal is to spark a discussion on how we can co-create this next decade together and it feels like that has started. I’m humbled and grateful.

We are not merely bystanders, each of our actions matter and have an influence on how the future unfolds.

This week I will try to continue that discussion, let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind

For millions of years, newly hatched sea turtles would run towards the brightest horizon to find the ocean. They adapted to sense the moonlight that bounced off the ocean.

But now, on developed beaches, hotels, streetlights and homes are brighter than the reflected moonlight that is refracted off the waves.

So the turtles race the wrong way, often with dire consequences. Their evolutionary make-up has not caught up with the electrified world. This is called evolutionary mismatch.

I believe we are the turtles right now.

We are running towards a synthetic version of success and meaning brought on by the acceleration of technology.

Our evolutionary hard-wiring wants to remove all of our struggles. Life used to be really difficult for our species so we evolved to look for ways to maximize reward while minimizing energy expenditure.

But meaning, our moonlight, historically comes from effort, struggle and then mastery. Instead we are running away from those things to a synthetic light that promises efficiency, speed and mastery without any hardship.

And if we don’t take steps to turn around or to try to understand the change that is happening, we are likely to encounter our own set of dire circumstances. One of which will be a widespread crisis of meaning.

I use this metaphor to highlight that the main problem we face in the upcoming Acceleration Decade is not a technological one. It is a psychological and a philosophical one.

In my last essay, I wrote about how humanity has collectively hit the fast forward button and how we can all start to prepare ourselves. It hit a cultural nerve and has already been read by over 200,000 readers.

This week I want to try to begin to outline the psychological cost of acceleration on an individual and collective level. And what’s contributing to it beyond just technological advancement.

What happens when the human nervous system is pushed beyond natural integration speed?

That’s the experiment we’re running.

Why The Acceleration Decade is not just a technological problem

Humans evolved to adapt to change over generations, not months or weeks.

Our psychological system is wildly adaptable but it evolved to digest these shifts when we have gradual technological change, stable communities, predictable life paths and clear cultural narratives.

That’s not the world we live in today. And it’s left many of us feeling shell-shocked.

So how does humanity make sense of things?

Throughout history, societies developed mechanisms to metabolize change.

I’ve identified five psychological enzymes that civilization has used in the past to transmute change:

1. Spirituality/Religion

2. Philosophy

3. Culture

4. Rituals

5. Community

Let’s dive into each.

Religion/Spirituality helped us process change through narrative stability and by providing us with answers that explained change and suffering.

Philosophy helped us process change by giving us the ability to interpret new realities. We could borrow frameworks to help us grasp ideas and build new ones.

Culture helped us process change by slowing down behavioural change. Culture would reinforce shared beliefs/understanding and pump the brakes on change outside of those (for better or worse).

Ritual helped us process change through integration of life transitions. When we, as individuals, have a strong sense of (anti-fragile) identity then it becomes easier to navigate a changing environment. Rituals help us understand who we are.

Community helped us process change through shared meaning-making. The community helps us give meaning to the change. And we can also distribute the psychological burden of change across the group.

You likely know where I’m going with this…

Religion is on the decline. Our communities are becoming more and more fragmented. Our rituals have all but disappeared. Culture is splintering in echo chambers. Philosophy is on the fringes and not taken seriously.

All five of the enzymes that help us process change are weakening, fairly dramatically.

It’s too easy to just blame technology for the wide-spread feelings of instability but in truth, it’s much more complicated than that. We’ve let the anchors of our society erode in favor of convenience, in favor of technology.

Now it’s as if our body is being flooded with one specific food but the enzymes that our body has to metabolize that food into helpful nutrients have gone offline. It doesn’t matter whether the food is good or bad for us, eventually it will make us sick because we cannot process it.

The food is change. We are getting unfiltered change, day after day after day. And the enzymes that help us digest it are disappearing.

Examining The Personal Cost

Societal and personal development typically follow a similar pattern: we face a large change (or challenge), we reflect on that change, we integrate our reflections through the help of psychological enzymes, that then leads to conscious growth.

Acceleration shortens reflection, removes integration, and pushes us into growth we never consciously choose.

For the last fifteen years, and acutely in the last ten, I experienced what comes from not having enough time to integrate change on a personal level.

I believe this is why my writing may be resonating. I am not speaking through abstract theories. I am pulling directly from my lived experience.

I went through immense change from a college drop-out, to a server, to a business development rep, to a Manager, to a Director, to ultimately co-founding and running a large venture capital firm, all in fifteen years. My life was about tackling challenges and then immediately finding a new one to tackle. Very little reflection and no time for integration. This led to growth, lots of growth but not growth I ever consciously chose.

Without time to integrate, I experienced severe anxiety, addiction, depression, burnout, constant comparison, a fear of falling behind and an unstable identity.

Yes, my story was self-induced acceleration. I am not looking for any pity. I made my decisions. But I believe my story is a microcosm of the larger problem to come for everybody. It will not be a choice whether or not you participate in the upcoming Acceleration Decade.

You can see this parallel in the symptoms, everything I struggled with in my accelerated life is also on the rise globally.

The World Health Organization says that anxiety disorders are now the most common mental disorders globally. They also cite that depression has been rising rapidly since 2020. Addiction is a broader bucket including alcohol, drugs, social media, porn, gaming and gambling. The statistics here are more country dependent, with alcohol showing a slow down in North America, but all others are on the rise globally. Burnout is a tougher one to track but from what I can read in Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 and definitely anecdotally, it’s quickly becoming an epidemic. I mean you just have to look around on Substack, right?

Of course, many forces contribute to these trends. But the speed and intensity of modern change appears to be an important part of the picture.

For years, we were taught that optimization was the answer to modern life. You just need to improve yourself and then you’ll feel better. But layering on more stuff to do is the last thing we should be doing when we haven’t even processed the change in our day to day lives. The answer doesn’t lie in more optimization, it lies in integration.

Time spent processing > time spent improving

The Personal Antidote

On the individual level, I believe part of the antidote lies in expanding our time spent in conscious reflection and integration. Integration, not optimization, is the answer.

A good place to start are the ten exercises that I outlined in my last essay:

Examining The Collective Cost

I’ve outlined the cost on the individual but what is the cost for society when we go through a period of mass, unfiltered extreme change and acceleration?

We are genuinely in unprecedented territory. I don’t think anyone really knows. Against my better judgment, I’ll try to answer this by examining a historical time period that looks similar, not the same, but similar.

I’m hesitant because I’ve come to believe that using historical examples downplays the real acceleration that is to come and can actually be harmful to the discussion. AI is not just another tool. We have never had a tool that can perform cognitive tasks once reserved for humans. It needs a new category altogether (conversation for another day). That’s why, in my eyes, comparisons usually fall down under scrutiny.

That all being said, I do believe the period after the invention of the Printing Press is the closest thing we have to today’s Acceleration Decade. Although slower by immeasurably orders of magnitude.

It was the first time that information began moving faster than humanity could metabolize it which led to society fracturing before reorganizing.

Before we had the Printing Press books were copied by hand, this led to books being very expensive, new knowledge spreading slowly, low literacy rates and much of the information being filtered by churches, universities and royal courts.

The whole thing was not democratic at all but it did create a more stable environment to process change. Ideas would spread gradually which meant the collective had time to absorb them. Post invention though, this all changed.

That resulted in an increase in war (Thirty Years’s War), mass propaganda (Pamphlet Wars), idealogical manifestos (The Twelve Articles), conspiracy theories (Witch Hunts) and an explosion of more radical religious/political movements (Anabaptists).

These are all things we’re seeing today: an increase in war, an increase in propaganda, an increase in conspiracy theories and an increase in radical movements. Again, there are many factors that contribute but these are heavy, heavy speeding tickets that humanity pays for acceleration.

…well that all sounds depressing.

There is hope, the good news is what came after.

It took over a century but eventually we created new intellectual frameworks (psychological enzymes) that helped us process the change and it led to modern science, the Age of Enlightenment, journalism (checks/balances on power) and then democratic institutions.

The Collective Antidote: I believe the answer again lies in integration. We need to begin to rebuild the psychological enzymes that help society integrate change. This means we need more people focused on reimagining and re-examining spirituality, philosophy, culture, rituals and community for the modern world. This is the conversation I will attempt to start in my next essay.

Can you imagine what beautiful ideas, systems and institutions we can build if we’re able to somehow metabolize and integrate this next wave of acceleration?

That is the challenge of our time because this acceleration is not going to stop.

The pace of technological chance will continue to increase, whether we feel ready for it or not. That seems inevitable.

What is not inevitable is how we respond to it.

If we continue to play the same game, if we continue to move from challenge to challenge with no time to integrate what we’ve experienced, the result will be more of the same: more anxiety, more confusion, more fragmentation and a deeper crisis of meaning.

But if we learn to metabolize change, individually through reflection/stillness and collectively through stronger philosophical, cultural and spiritual frameworks then the same acceleration can unlock an entirely different future.

The technology that is being built will shape the world.

But, we must not forget, it’s the quality of our minds/nervous systems that determines whether that world is chaotic or beautiful. At least for now, we are still in control.

A lot of the narratives out there make us feel like there’s nothing we can do, like we’re on some pre-determined path and we just have to strap in. That is not true.

We can choose to step back and re-learn how to integrate change.

That work begins with the individual.

Only with clear minds can we begin to tackle the next herculean challenge of co-creating better stories/ideas and rebuilding our collective psychological enzymes.

Through strengthening those pillars, we can take the onus off the individual, come together and start to build a world that works for all of us.

I will attempt to explore some of those new stories in my next essay.

Right now we may be like the sea turtles running towards artificial light. But the task ahead is not to stop the lights from appearing. It is to learn how to re-orient and remember which horizon is the real ocean.

Editor’s note:

You can continue onto the third essay in my series on the Acceleration Decade below where I reimagine new stories and try to understand what may come next:

latest.podcast.episode

This was one of my favorite recent conversation. I sat down with my friend, Richard Banfield, co-founder of Second Harvest. Richard opens up about losing his wife to cancer and how that experience reshaped the way he approaches life, meaning, and the time we are given. We also go down a few fascinating rabbit holes, from the Cambrian explosion and human evolution to how technology is shaping the next phase of our species.

Give the episode a listen here or wherever you 🎧 to your podcasts.

Please support our partners (they are all doing incredible work in the world)

Dreamfuel - the leading mental performance coaching platform for technology teams. As a Wake Up Call subscriber, you are eligible for a free 1-1 or team coaching session.

Enfold - five days can change the course of your life forever. If you mention Wake Up Call, your application will be prioritized.

Second Harvest - you’ve done what was expected, now what? Through small groups, honest conversations, and carefully chosen experiences, Second Harvest helps people reconnect to what actually matters.

Before we wrap up, I want to address a few things.

There was some healthy push back around the fact that many people in the world do not have the luxury of following some of the practices I outlined in my last essay.

I want to acknowledge that there are still ~700-840 million people in extreme poverty who struggle to find reliable food, shelter, basic healthcare and clean water. When in pure survival mode, you do not have time to spend an afternoon in silence or worry about building an anti-fragile identity. That is valid and true. Full stop.

What I will say is I have been travelling around India for the last four months around folks who would fall under that line and many of them still prioritize some form of stillness and silence. I’ve seen the practices I shared, which are really just timeless/ancient traditions, have a profound effect regardless of where you may sit on Maslow’s hierarchy.

The other fair call out was that the world faces many problems in the upcoming decade including a climate crisis, an increase in global conflict, poverty, social safety nets collapsing, housing insecurity and global debt levels rising, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. Like you, I see them all, there are many complex problems we face and the instability caused by technological acceleration is but one of them.

Unfortunately, I am just one human. A human that, through lived experience, feels as if I have something worthwhile to share when it comes to the upcoming decade of acceleration. We need other, more qualified people, to examine solutions for the other problems we face.

I do believe that these problems are all inter-connected. By examining one problem, we start to bleed into others so who knows perhaps, with your help, we can start a discussion on the other problems down the line.

Thank you for reading this, I hope you join the discussion. I read each and every comment.

That being said, this Wednesday, I’m taking my own advice and I’ll be entering into a Vipassana retreat (10-day silent meditation retreat). I will respond to any messages/comments once I’m out on the 29th.

See you on the other side,

Scott Barker

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Editor’s Note: This essay blew up (thank you, all) and sparked an incredible conversation. It is part one of a series I’ve been writing, the follow-up essay explores the deeper psychological implications of acceleration:

Welcome to edition #14 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How we are about to enter a decade of rapid acceleration, the likes of which we have never seen. And ten ways you can prepare yourself to move through it with some semblance of peace and equanimity

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life. Each week I write one non-fictional essay for the mind and one fictional story for the soul.

This week has only one essay. I believe this is one of the most important and urgent things I have written, maybe ever. I never ask my subscribers to comment or restack but if you find this edition helpful, please consider helping to spread the word somehow so it can reach more people.

My hope is that this piece sparks a discussion on how we can co-create this next decade together. We are not merely bystanders, each of our actions matter and have an influence on how the future unfolds.

Thank you for being here, let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind.

We’re about to enter what I call The Acceleration Decade. It will be one of the most destabilizing decades in human history, particularly on the psyche. The change will be fast, personalized and relentless.

I feel uniquely qualified to speak on this because I just went through my own personal Acceleration Decade and let’s just say, it didn’t end well.

I lived my life in fast forward.

In ten years, I went from a BDR at a small, Vancouver-based start-up to co-founding & building one of the hottest new venture capital funds on the planet. I optimized my entire life for acceleration and outcomes.

On a grand scale, we’re all about to embark on the same experiment and not necessarily by choice. As a species, we are hitting the fast forward button. Our religion has become speed and our God is immediate outcomes.

And I don’t care how fast you’re able to learn or adapt to the change, there is a problem with our biological make-up. I learned this first-hand.

Over the last decade, I essentially turned myself into a machine. I learned fintech, then broader software, then media and finally venture capital. I was able to climb very close to the top of three of those industries. It required an immense amount of sacrifice, an insatiable drive for more and an obsession with learning and optimizing.

Most importantly, it required me to override my basic human needs. The needs of true connection, processing change, dealing with emotions and finding stillness. Those were bugs (or hindrances) that slowed down getting what I wanted. I found that if I kept myself suitably distracted or intoxicated, I could medicate those bugs away.

And it worked, until it didn’t.

Eventually the constant rapid change, the obsession with more, the feeling of being completely disconnected from myself and the insane acceleration caught up with me. I could not focus without a pill. I could not sleep without a different pill. I could not relax without a drink. I could not process without a panic attack. I short-circuited my entire system.

I fear that over the next few years stories like mine will become the rule not the exception. And not by choice or desire either, you will be forced into a high-paced game just to simply keep up with the speed of change.

The evolution of our mind and nervous system is painstakingly slow. We’re stuck with the Mesolithic Era V2 model. The cracks in the model are already showing through increased anxiety, sleep disruption, attention fragmentation, addiction pathways and loneliness. Quite frankly, it’s already not a fair fight for the world we’ve created today and it’s just going to get worse.

In this edition, I will not be teaching you how to acquire more over the next ten years. If that’s what you’re after, trust me, you won’t have to look far. The acceleration itself will take care of that. There will be an abundance of more everywhere you look. More people shilling you ways to make more. More tech, more content, more things to buy, more news, more convenience, more things fighting for your attention, more, more, more.

What I will try to do is use my lived experience and the time I’ve spent disconnected from the system to give you my best ideas on how to prepare yourself against the onslaught of more, and the rapid pace of change. To prepare so that you might find some peace, sanity, and meaning through the next ten years.

Let’s start with what we’re up against:

The Acceleration Decade.

So what is coming?

I will not pretend to be smart enough to know exactly what’s going to happen. I won’t try to predict if we enter a Dystopian or Utopian Era. But what I do know is that we have been compressing time and that will continue to accelerate.

Yes, you’re not losing your mind. Time is compressing.

That is essentially the job of all technology: to compress time.

I’m not talking physics, I’m talking about our subjective experience of time. Not that hours are shorter, but the distance between desire and fulfillment is collapsing. And our nervous systems were not build to handle it.

As my friend, Richard Banfield at Second Harvest, just put succinctly:

“Technology shrinks the time between what you want to happen to it actually happening.”

In sci-fi movies, we’ve always been obsessed with time travel. Turns out humans have been time travellers since our first inventions.

Take something as rudimentary as a small wooden raft that one of our ancestors used to float across a raging river. In one reality, his clan could not risk the cross so they took two days to walk around the river. But in the new reality, they crossed on the raft in twenty minutes. They just time travelled forward one day, eleven hours and forty minutes. We’ve been obsessed with accelerating time since the very beginning.

For a long time though, there were barriers that helped slow down that compression. Those barriers were mainly 1. Invention and 2. Adoption

People had to actually invent the technology which took time then people had to adopt the technology which took more time. The extra time that invention and adoption gave humanity, was used to adapt both ourselves and our society. So by the time the next thing came along we, as humans, and we as a collective, felt ‘ready’.

But now invention is speeding up exponentially and adoption can be almost instantaneous, particularly with consumer AI. The buffer or integration zone is gone.

Why are they speeding up?

Invention speeds up in a few ways but mainly through ‘combinatorial innovation’.

Combinatorial invention is the process of creating new technologies, products, or processes by recombining existing components, knowledge, or technologies in novel ways. It posits that few technologies are created from nothing, but rather constructed from pre-existing parts, driven by need and the interplay of experience. This approach allows for a nearly infinite space of potential technological configurations.

An oversimplification but essentially, steam power accelerated the invention of electricity, electricity accelerated the invention of computing, the internet accelerated the invention of mobile, mobile paired with the internet accelerated the invention of AI and so on, and so on. Each wave combines to accelerate towards infinitely more variants that can then go on to combine into even more.

Adoption speeds up through distribution and education.

The agricultural revolution took thousands of years to spread. The printing press took over a century to make its way across Europe. Then electrification took around forty years to reach most households in America. ChatGPT reached 100M users in roughly two months. The difference comes down to efficient distribution and education.

One of the more insidious things that technology is doing now is it’s saving us time, then quietly spending it for us. It does this by expanding what is now possible and what is now expected of us.

So technology itself is a fast forward button and the two pause buttons we had in the past have become a 2x speed and a 10x speed button. That is why we are entering warp speed. That is why we are entering the Acceleration Decade.

So what can we do to prepare ourselves?

Below I’ll explore ten ideas that have helped me return to a healthy baseline. A baseline where my mind, body and soul feel calm, at peace and inspired again. I believe these same ideas are perfectly suited to helping you navigate the future.

Each idea will have an exercise that will help you in your preparation.

What we’ll cover:

1. Slowing down as a strategy

2. Build depth, not route skills

3. Train your nervous system

4. Invest in real connection

5. Foster an anti-fragile identity

6. Learn to separate signal from noise

7. Redefine your definition of success

8. Analyze the trades you’re making

9. Cultivate longer time horizons

10. Do not give in to cynicism

+ a bonus one that trumps them all

1. Slowing down as a strategy

We’ll start with the one that feels like common sense. If you were in a car that was going 100mph and accelerating more and more every minute, what would you do? You’d probably try to slow down. Unfortunately, for many of us, this goes against everything we’ve been taught.

Until now, the rewards went to those of us who were masters at compressing time. If you were able to delegate, automate and move faster than your competitors then you would outcompete them.

The modern world programmed us for efficiency. Efficiency is the ability to achieve a desired result with the least possible waste of time, energy or resources. The more output you get from the same (or fewer inputs), the more efficient you are. The problem is that efficiency has become confused, and almost synonymous with speed, but they are not the same thing.

Going back to the car example, if your desired output is to make a right turn and you’re already going 100mph, then increasing your speed is not the answer. The most efficient way to get to your desired output is to decelerate so you can identify the exit, change lanes and execute the turn safely.

The environment we will be in is going to have the acceleration covered for us. Your job will be to know when to decelerate so you can see where you’re going clearly, make crucial adjustments and arrive safely at the outcome you desire.

Do this to prepare:

For the next month, find one afternoon in your busy schedule that you can carve out. Do not schedule anything and let your immediate family know that you will be practicing silence and would appreciate not being disturbed. If needed, go to a different environment.

For six hours, do not speak to anyone, do not write anything, do not read anything, do not make this a thinking session, let thoughts come and go without attachment. No technology. Try not to ‘consume’ anything at all through all of your senses. There is nothing to do. There is nowhere to be.

You will find that ‘answers’ to the big question or decision you’ve been thinking about will slowly arise. If they don’t, that’s ok. You’re building the new skill of slowing down and ‘being’, like any skill it will take to foster. This afternoon will become your edge.

2. Build depth, not route skills

Again, this one goes against what we were taught would make us successful in the modern world. Go learn one skill, become really good at it and that’s the path to success. Niche down. Focus all your efforts in one area. All of this advice has become irrelevant.

What happens when the skill you spent your life learning can be done at 80% proficiency by a novice in a matter of minutes. We’re already there across most disciplines. AI and robotics will eventually flatten all surface-level skills.

The skills that will matter in the future will be things like judgement, taste, the ability to make connections across disciplines, story telling and moral/ethical reasoning. Going back to the car example, the skills you will need will more closely mirror a navigator than that of the actual driver.

Taste, judgement, cross-disciplinary connections, story-telling and moral reasoning are much harder to foster. These require life experience, failures, interests in many different areas and a lot of time spent in contemplation. It will require you to understand how you actually view the world, what you stand for and who you are.

Do this to prepare:

Choose one big question: What is success? What does power mean to me? What is a meaningful life?

For the next 14 days, explore that question deeply through various lenses. Look at it from the lens of philosophy, science, history and your own personal experience. Read from a wide variety of sources. It’s ok to use AI as part of your curation but I strongly encourage you to not use that as your only gateway to information.

3. Train your nervous system

Focusing on your nervous system felt like a luxury in the past. It was something you did if you had the time to alleviate stress and improve the quality of your life. It was usually priority number ten or twelve on the list. This will have to become priority number one for all of us.

When you reach a certain level of velocity, as we all will be forced into, this becomes a necessity. Take it from someone who, at one point, had a therapist, a spiritual advisor and a coach (all at once) just to try to regulate my nervous system so I could continue to function. There is no escaping the havoc that the speed and pace of change will have on our nervous systems.

However, we are lucky that our ancestors did not grow up in the environment we have so they had time to go inward, understand themselves and build/teach timeless practices that nourish our souls and nervous systems. We must adopt these ancient practices with urgency.

Meditation. Silence. Solitude. Yoga. Long walks. Sweating. Sleep discipline. Nature. Disconnection. Contemplation. Healthy discourse.

Sounds simple but these practices will require more and more discipline as the acceleration continues. Everywhere you look, there will be ‘solutions’ to the increasing feeling of overwhelm, anxiety and the fear that ‘you’re falling behind’. It will come in the form of one to one customized entertainment, new social distraction apps, pills, shots, bio-devices, etc. Everything will tell you that there’s something wrong with you, not the environment. That it’s you that needs to be fixed, not society.

We must take care of ourselves. Yet we cannot fall into the trap that fixing ourselves is all that is needed. The solutions are not only at an individual level. We need folks to get involved in their corner of the world to improve our systems for community design, regulation/guardrails around tech, education that focuses on being not just doing and building institutions worth trusting again.

Here’s a rule of thumb that works for me: everything you need to control your nervous system is free and available to you at any time. The only cost is time. Everything else is a parlor trick.

Do this to prepare:

Build a daily one-hour practice that encompasses movement, stillness, breath and solitude. Guard that time as if your life depends on it. I believe it does.

Get involved in one social impact initiative within your community. Purpose can change how your body interprets effort and stress.

4. Invest in real connection

Now I don’t want to sound dismissive of online connection and community, for many it can be a much-needed lifeline. Those relationships can be real and meaningful but they are not sufficient on their own. It can be dangerous to mistake broad connection for deep connection. The danger of making that mistake is going to be amplified.

There will continue to be mass lay-offs across every sector of the economy. The whole idea of ‘new jobs will be created just as fast’ is just not true. We will not need as many humans in the loop to get to the same outputs. Full stop.

Work and employment, as we know it, has changed forever. What I think will happen is that more people will be forced into entrepreneurship, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For much of the history of human commerce, this was the case.

As a byproduct of this, there will be tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of people who simultaneously have to promote, market and sell their goods or services. They will not have big marketing or advertising budgets like corporations, so where will they turn? They’ll turn to social media.

If we’ve been in the consumption era of social media, we’re about to enter the creation era. Not necessarily as a creative outlet but as a means of survival. Competition will be brutal and ruthless. Supply of content will go way up but demand of consumption will stay the same, maybe even decline slightly as more people understand the impact on their mental health.

The more time you spend on social media platforms, the larger your social footprint and web of connectivity grows. We are not meant to manage hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of relationships. And it’s incredibly exhausting. We have to pull that energy from somewhere. More often than not, we pull that energy away from the real connections in our lives. The connections with true close friends and loved ones.

I saw this first-hand. As my ‘community’ or ‘following’ on Linkedin grew, I gave my time/attention to tens of thousands of connections yet barely had time to call my mom.

Do this to prepare:

Curate a list of ten people that you really enjoy having in your life. Set a reminder/alarm on your phone for a time that’s usually not that busy. Each day when that alarm goes off, reach out to one of those ten people. It can be a call, a message, a voice note, anything.

Also set three healthy boundaries for the rest of the relationships or social connections in your life ie. deleting social apps from your phone, a dedicated day or time slot to engage with your broader network, no email/imessage/whatsapp after 8pm, etc.

5. Fostering an anti-fragile identity

This is a big one. My friend, Chris Walker, talks about identity a lot. You can check out the podcast I recently recorded with him on the topic.

This idea also pulls from Nassim Taleb’s thoughts and ideas in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

Careers and ‘work’ as we know it will become completely nonlinear. Entire industries and sectors of the economy are going to be reorganized. Most of the roles we know now will disappear. New roles will get created, emerge quickly then disappear just as fast.

Many of us have our identities overly wrapped up in our careers. I know I did. I was successful tech/vc/sales guy and when that was no longer the case, it felt like a part of me died and it was very disorienting. Luckily, I had the time and space to examine that identity, grieve it and start to build a new one. Not everyone will be so lucky in the future. Get ahead of it and start to de-couple your identity from work now.

If your identity is:

I am a lawyer, I am a doctor, I am a marketer, I am a salesperson

You will experience a lot of suffering.

You’ll have to shift towards a new identity that goes beyond the roles you play in society:

exp. I am someone who can learn, adapt and thrive in new environments or to borrow from Ram Dass, I am loving awareness

Nassim defines antifragility as systems that benefit from disorder. If your identity is I thrive in new environments then you actually benefit from the change. You will want to build an identity that strengthens under the pressure of constant change and chaos.

Lastly, play around with the feeling of no identity. What if you did not need a label at all? That just being is enough. That in every present moment you decide through your actions who you want to be.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Write down your top 5 identity labels (founder, investor, writer, athlete, father, etc). Now cross them all out. If all of these disappeared tomorrow, who would you still be?

Let your new ‘identity’ unfold (or dissolve) from that.

6. Learn to separate signal from noise

As Yuval Noah Harari said: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”

The explosion of AI-generated content, news, synthetic media, infinite opinions and infinite ways to optimize has barely begun. I’m sure you’re feeling the wave coming when you go online but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

This content storm is going to get incredible at manipulating your fears and desires to get you to take action.

Ads, videos and newsletters will be customized at a one to one level, meaning something is generated just for you based on everything the internet knows about you. You will need to get really good at navigating your ship through this storm.

Do this exercise to prepare:

List everything you consumed in the last forty eight hours (podcasts, group chats, newsletters, social media posts, TV shows). For each item, ask these three questions:

1. Did this change my thinking in a durable, positive way?

2. How did this influence me? Will I still remember this in 30 days?

3. Did this alter a decision I made for the better?

If the answer is no to all three, it was noise. Then begin to ruthlessly curate what you consume.

7. Redefine your definition of success

This list is my guess at what will prepare a person to be successful over the next chapter of humanity. But over the last year or so, I have refined what success means to me. And I would encourage everyone else to do the same. If you don’t you may unconsciously shoot for a target that you don’t even want. I did that for many years.

I defined success for myself when I was very young. It was money, status and the admiration of others. Those became my north stars. I lied to myself along the way about meaning but, in truth that’s what I wanted.

I achieved all of those things and they did not work for me. I was not any more content, happy or fulfilled.

After a lot of personal inquisition, my loose definition of success has become:

Someone who feels deeply connected to themself and the world around them. Who has enough peace and equanimity in their daily life to seek truth and express that truth. A person who has the courage to take action to help create a better future for all. And one who chooses love over fear as often as they can.

Inherently in this list, you’ll see my bias towards that type of success show up. That’s what I’m aiming at and this list is for myself as much as others, so that is what this list optimizes for.

I’m not here to judge anyone’s definition of success. Over this same time period we will see a level of the monetary and status success that we cannot even fully comprehend yet. And even if, like me, those games have lost their allure for you right now, they may come back into style in a big way. Because what they will unlock will be the things of science fiction…

What happens in a world where if you reach a certain level of wealth or status, you can extend your lifespan another 150 years? What happens when money can ensure that your child never has a single disease? What happens when a certain level of status allows you to live out your wildest fantasies every single day? What happens when you can use money to erase every single feeling of pain and discomfort?

It’s human nature to want those things. And, just like we are now, we will be sold on the idea that without those things life is meaningless and the never-ending-pursuit-of-more cycle will begin again. It sounds insane to even write but there will likely come a point in our lifetimes where we will have to decide whether sacrificing our present reality in order to achieve enough money to live another fifty or sixty years is worth it. Years will be for purchase. Does that fit within your personalized definition of success? Only you can decide.

But make the decisions consciously or the algorithms will come up with the answer for you.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Finish this line: “I will feel successful when ______”

Go deep. For everything you write down, ask yourself: “Who taught me this mattered?”

Was it your younger self, your parents, social media?

Now imagine you are 80 years old and you’re about to die. You can only keep three metrics of success from your current definition. Which three really matter? Which feel empty?

Then write it down and build a new definition of success based on those.

8. Analyze the trades you are making

Have you seen the movie Click?

Remember the one with Adam Sandler who was given a remote that allowed him to fast forward parts of his life. Naturally he fast forwarded through all the perceived inconveniences and painful parts of life until he ends up in a future he does not recognize (or want). Turns out, that movie was far ahead of its time. If he was consciously aware of the trades he was making by using the remote, would he have still used it?

As outlined earlier, technology allows us to fast forward through our perceived inconveniencies and pain to the outcome we want. But these trades are not free. They come at a cost.

I wrote about this a few months back:

Every time we blindly adopt a new technology, we are outsourcing a part of our mental or physical ability. Over time, that ability atrophies rapidly. Abilities that have taken 300,000 years of evolution to form can be decimated in one single lifetime. Which abilities are we comfortable trading?

There’s already early evidence that artificial intelligence may be lowering our IQ. MIT Media Lab recently released a report that ‘excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions may contribute’ to ‘cognitive atrophy’ and the shrinking of critical thinking abilities. It’s a small study and yet to be peer-reviewed but it feels directionally accurate when you look at historical examples.

That means we are trading our ability to critically and creatively think for access to answers/outcomes faster. It’s only been four years with a fairly rudimentary version of AI…what happens after another ten years of making that trade?

Cultivating awareness around the sacrifices we are making will be critical if you’d like to maintain some levels of cognitive and physical function.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Pick five core technologies that you use daily and monitor them for seven days. For each one, fill out a grid with Column A) What does this give me? Column B) What is it quietly costing me?

After the week, ask yourself these two questions: “If this technology disappeared tomorrow, what would I regain?” and “Does the benefit outweigh the internal cost for the life I want?”

9. Cultivate longer time horizons

Instant outcomes. Our personal innovation cycles tighten. Feedback loops become immediate. The time between you thinking I want and I now have will disappear.

You’ll have a thought and that thought will become reality faster than you can imagine. But many of our thoughts are based on impulse, habit loops and conditioning, rather than true conscious intention. That period of time of not immediately getting what you want was a good thing. It kept us from straying too far away from our North Star. Soon it will be easier than ever to go way off track from the life you intended to build.

Acceleration rewards reaction but true evolution rewards patience. This is why thinking in terms of decades, rather than day, weeks, months or even years will be a competitive moat when building a life of meaning.

Ensure that even with the longer time horizons you are not getting overly attached to the outcome. Focus on the process, feeling and intention.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Pick one project that will take a minimum of a decade to actualize (ie. building a body of meaningful work, mastering a domain of interest, raising children with intention, spiritual development) and commit to it.

Write your obituary. Then ask yourself, through that lens: What am I doing right now that that version of me will find trivial? and What am I neglecting that that version would care deeply about?

10. Do not give into cynicism

Candidly, I lost hope six months ago. A few months after the initial excitement of leaving my old life behind faded, I started really thinking about the state of the world, where I wanted to play a role, what impact I wanted to have and who I wanted to serve.

Before that, I had basically tuned the entire world out in order to focus on my own personal growth and development for months. But you can only do that for so long and I was called to examine the state of humanity. I’m talking like, really dive into all of it. Understand world events better, why they were happening, how technology was impacting our lives and where we were headed. And frankly, it looked really f***ing bleak.

Between the increase in global conflict, the World Order being rearranged, the rapid advancement of new technology, our leaders letting us down again and again, our dying planet, humans playing god through bioengineering, the potential for synthetic pathogens, erosion of institutional trust at a massive scale and the crisis of meaning. It’s a lot to take in.

My initial reaction was to maybe stay lost forever, just to opt-out of it all, focus on my immediate friends/family and ride it out in some cabin in the woods. Essentially, to put my head in the sand. But as I sat with it, I realized that’s exactly how we got here. That is what society’s reaction has been. It all feels too overwhelming so we all agreed to just put our head in the sand and pretend everything is fine. That reaction happens when people lose hope.

We must not lose hope. We must not lose hope in the good of the world. We must not lose hope that new leaders will emerge. We must not lose hope that what we do matters. We must not lose hope that we can wield these new technologies responsibly. We must not lose hope that we can save our planet. We must not lose hope that love will beat back fear, as it always does.

You must spread hope in your little part of the world. To spread hope you must take action, however big or small.

Do this exercise to prepare:

Write two letters to yourself. The first one starts with “If the next ten years go badly…”. Go into detail. This will showcase the floor of how bad it could get but also highlight the agency that you have in not making those realities come to pass.

Then write a letter dated 2036 to your present self and begin it with “You were worried about the future. Here’s what you didn’t see coming…” and list all of the incredible things that came to pass that you didn’t expect.

WARNING: I use the big G word below. If that word doesn’t work for you, please swap it out with Truth, Love, Reality, the deepest layer of Being or whatever works for you.

(Bonus) 11. Look for God

We all worship something. We all have a God, whether we give it that name or not.

“Attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” - Simone Weil

Where does the vast majority of your attention flow to? What do you pray to every day?

Whatever that is, that is your God.

For many of us, we spend an overwhelming amount of our time, energy and attention trying to accumulate money and status.

The West may be an increasingly non-religious society, but that doesn’t mean we do not have a God. Our God has become money and status. We worship it every day with our attention.

I’m not here to pass judgement or tell you what God to follow. But I would urge you to look for yourself at what you truly worship.

When I say look for God, I do not mean in the theological or metaphysical sense. I do not care what religion you follow, what belief system you have or what doctrine you ascribe to.

I believe that they are all trying to point to the same thing, which I will paraphrase from Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy:

1. There is a Divine Ground of Being

2. The True Self is Not the Ego

3. The Goal is Realization, Not Belief

Put in very simple terms:

There is an ultimate, divine reality underlying the world. The human soul is capable of directly knowing it and the purpose of life is to realize this union.

I also very intentionally used the language Look for God rather than Find God or Believe in God. I do not claim to know exactly what the divine reality underlying the world is. Nor, will I likely ever come close to grasping it. My understanding will evolve, my beliefs will shift, but in the act of looking or seeking - I have found some peace.

I believe that if you start looking, you will be able to find peace as well. Most everyone I have met on my journey that is on the path of seeking come to a very similar conclusion: that we are all one.

And when you truly embody that idea, when you start to circle around that conclusion, a natural personal transformation follows with a renewed focus on compassion, humility, love and selflessness. More of that is what you really need to prepare for the next decade.

It’s what you need. It’s what I need. It’s what humanity needs. The utopian future is possible. And that is where it starts.

latest.podcast.episode

This week I sat down Devon Warwick McDonald, Partner at Openview and Co-founder at Second Harvest.

Devon and I talk through identity, listening to you body's warning signs, divorce, walking away from a role people spend decades trying to earn, sitting in the goo of transformation and the work she’s doing now to help other’s find the courage/clarity to write their next chapter.

You can listen to the full episode here.

Please support our partners (they are both doing incredible work in the world)

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Thank you for reading this.

Now the counterargument here is that humans have always panicked when a new technology is released. The printing press, the factory, the internet, each of these felt destabilizing but went on to improve the quality of life for billions. The Acceleration Decade will also cure diseases, lift people out of poverty, expand education and unlock immense creativity. My worry is not the upside, it’s the pace.

I truly hope that these exercises bring you some peace, contentment and equanimity when things start feeling like they are moving too fast.

I still have to remind myself of these things every day. And I hope this becomes a place you can come back to when you feel a little shaky/unstable and need a gentle reminder.

If you connected with this piece, I would ask you to comment below, share it with a friend, restack it or even just hit the ‘like’ button so that it can reach more people who may feel overwhelmed already.

It really does mean a lot.

Buckle up, it’s going to get weird but I know the future will be beautiful because we get to consciously create it together.

Scott Barker

Note: If you would like to continue the next essay in this series, part two explores the deeper implications of acceleration on the individual and collective:

In part three, I try to reimagine new systems and stories that fit within our ever-accelerating world and what may come next:

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research and debate). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #13 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. Transitioning through the three main games of life and how not to get trapped

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

Thanks for being here, let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

The great game of life is often described as a single journey, but for me, it has been helpful to understand it more as three successive games.

We are meant to figure out these three games before we die. All of which are here to help us grow, evolve and get closer to accepting our own death.

1. The Game of Survival

2. The Game of More

3. The Game of Meaning

You see these games repeated throughout history. Once survival stabilizes, human attention shifts towards accumulation, and only when accumulation feels empty do questions of meaning start to dominate our thinking.

You need the lessons you learned from each game in order to fully grasp the next one. We are meant to pass through them in chronological order (although sometimes life events can cause us to jump back and forth between them). If you are not conscious, curious and present in your life it is easy to miss important steps and get caught in a loop playing the same game over and over.

You can also get caught in-between games, in a liminal state. This happens when you finish one game but not ready to embrace the next.

A key feature of each game is that when you are playing that game, it feels like it’s the only game. In other words, it’s almost impossible for someone in the game of survival to grasp the game of more. If you’re in the game of more, the game of meaning makes no sense.

The game of survival and the game of more have roughly the same rules and measures for success. The game of meaning has no real rules or measures which stops many from ever playing it.

All of us are meant to eventually graduate to the game of meaning but most of us get caught in the game of more for too long. Our graduation day comes too late, often on our death bed.

I made this diagram to illustrate how we progress through the games:

1. The Game of Survival

The game of survival is dominated by fear-driven behaviour.

As soon as we are conscious, we’re inducted into this game. As a living being on planet earth, our main objective is to survive and procreate. In order to survive, we need oxygen, food, water, shelter and companionship.

At the beginning of our life, we are dependent on others for our survival. This is where we start building our character for the game. We are all born with unique qualities but we go about picking and choosing new attributes for our character based on what will help us survive in the environment we have been born into. We mold ourselves in whatever way we have to in order to make sure the people around us like us enough to keep helping us progress in the game.

Maybe we get the sense that love comes when I do not cause trouble so we suppress anger, sadness and disagreement. We become very compliant, start to people-please and avoid conflict at all costs.

Perhaps it becomes I am valued when I perform so we adapt to become hyper-competitive, ambitious, strive towards perfection and begin to tie our self worth to achievement.

It could be something like I am here to stabilize others if your environment is chaotic so you go about trying to manage the emotions of everyone around you. And you begin to ignore personal needs to keep the peace.

Another common one is learning that I am valued only when I am accepted which leads us to act differently depending on our environment. We start to copy other’s interests, opinions or behaviours to fit in and lose touch with our own unique qualities.

There are many more behavioural adaptations that we try on as we are forming our sense of self and identity.

At this stage, many of these adaptations are features not bugs. These new parts of us we create often help us in the game of survival. They kept us safe and kept us in good graces with the people around us.

All of the unique qualities we are born with plus all of these adaptations become who we think we are. They become our ego.

Then we step into adulthood and use our ego structure to try to go figure out the game of survival for ourselves. We start careers that fit the character we created and use that to acquire money. Money we can spend on food, shelter and to attract companionship.

Unfortunately, in society, not all adaptations are created equal. Some are rewarded and some are punished. Someone who is overly compliant/avoids conflict may never get the leadership promotion because the person who did had learned I am only valued when I perform. That person had their entire self-worth tied to that promotion so worked 10x harder, it was never a fair fight.

Success in the survival game is all much more random than it seems. You take your unique qualities, your learned adaptations and the opportunities you’re born into, mix that all up and then you try to do your best.

If you’re lucky, then one day you wake up and you no longer have to worry about food, shelter and companionship. You did it, you won the game of survival. This is no small feat, 99.99% of humans throughout history were stuck here. And today globally, billions still remain in the survival game.

You have been given an incredible gift. So, now what?

2. The Game of More

The game of more is dominated by comparison-driven behavior.

If the rules in the game of survival are: acquire resources and money in order to survive.

Then the rules in the game of more are: acquire more resources and more money in order to survive more comfortably.

It’s a subtle difference but it has big implications.

The game of survival has a defined end point. We can feel it. It’s when we stop worrying about where our next meal is going to come from or how we are going to pay rent.

The game of more prays on these same survival instincts and will convince us we’re still in the game of survival. That our survival depends on more. The problem with more is it’s never attainable. There’s always more more to be acquired.

This is also when we begin to rewrite our own rules of survival. Food, shelter and companionship become not nearly enough. We grow accustomed to certain conveniences and convince ourselves that we need them in order to survive.

We lose many of the best and brightest among us to this game because they become quite impressive at it and the rewards are seductive. The game of more morphs and mutates depending on the person playing: some play it for money, some play it for power, some play it for status.

Whichever one you pick, as you climb the ranks, it feels really good.

In the way that we have structured society, almost all of the people we look up to and worship are people who are at the top of the game of more. Every cycle you spend in the game of more starts to compound. More money, more fame, more power, more things, more experiences. As we acquire more, we also begin to have a deep fear of losing our more so we try to speed up the cycles.

As we progress and get a little older, it’s common that we begin to think about meaning. Perhaps we find meaning in playing the game itself, in our family, in a problem we are solving or in some form of service but, when we are stuck in the game of more, you will always arrive at the same conclusion when you think of meaning: in order for my life to have meaning, I need more.

If I find meaning in playing the game itself, I need more so I can prove I’m the best at the game. If I find meaning in my family, I need more so I can provide more opportunities for them. If I find meaning in solving a problem, I need more in order to solve that problem for more people. If I find meaning in a form of service, I need more in order to serve the cause better.

We fall backwards into meaning, a meaning that fits within our continued pursuit of more. Now, armed with our righteous meaning, we give ourselves completely to the endless cycle of more. This is how most high performers spend their lives. They do not ascend to the game of meaning until they are faced with imminent death and then scramble to make sense of it all in their final moments.

Since there is no winning the game of more, there are only two ways out of the game:

1. A wake-up call 2. Deep, inner work and reflection

A wake-up call often imitates the experience of imminent death, it could be an accident, a death of a loved one, an illness, addiction, divorce, a profound spiritual experience or losing/gaining everything. It looks different for everybody but it’s something that rocks your ego structure to the core and makes you feel as if the old you is dying.

We have many of them throughout our lives, it’s typically not one big dramatic wake-up call that wakes us up all at once. Most, if not all of them, we ignore.

Some wake-up calls even accelerate our pursuit of more, particularly if we have certain adaptations. I’ve seen it often where someone will have a wake-up call which leads them to think of their legacy. And in the mental framework of more, your legacy is defined by how much money and resources you have. Naturally, they will get even more fearful of loss and double down on acquiring more but now under the warm, fuzzy guise of legacy.

Now I want to make something clear: the game of more is necessary. Civilization depends on people playing it. Without it, we would not have medicine, infrastructure, advanced technology or higher education.

The danger is not the game. It’s never exiting the game.

From personal experience, if we stay in the game of more for too long it will start to make us physically, mentally and spiritually sick. And we ignore wake-up calls at our own peril because the final wake-up call waits for us all.

The second way out is becoming exceedingly rare in the modern world. Through deep inner reflection and contemplation, we can examine our relationship to the game of more and question the fabric of the game. In order to do this, we must get to know ourselves at an intimate level, deconstruct why we are the way we are, ruthlessly examine our intentions/pursuits and deprogram ourselves little by little. Essentially you begin the game of meaning while still playing the game of more and eventually lose interest in the game of more.

I can count on one hand the amount of people I know who I have seen make this transition without the aid of a wake-up call. For me, it took blowing up my entire life.

However you get there, If you’re lucky, one day it will all get so uncomfortable that you will wake up and realize that you are no longer spending most of your day thinking about how to acquire more.

Congratulations, you’re ready to move onto the most painful/confusing game yet.

3. The Game of Meaning

The game of meaning is dominated by purpose-driven behavior. And, as far as we know, this game is a uniquely human one.

Maybe in the future we’ll figure out that antelopes stay up at night thinking Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live? but for now, we are the only species we know of that has the ability to ask ourselves these questions.

Out of all of the millions of life forms on earth, we are the only ones with the capacity to play this game. For that reason alone, we have a responsibility to spend at least a part of our short lives playing it.

Of course, every human on earth asks themselves those questions at one point in time. We read a few books, maybe adopt some form of spirituality to help us progress or we outsource the answers to one of our many Gods/religious texts. It’s too uncomfortable to stay with these questions for long.

The game of meaning is where we try to find out who we really are, why we are here and what our life’s work (dharma) is meant to be.

It’s an excruciating path, one that many avoid at all costs. And to make the pursuit of these questions the focal point of our existence?

No way. Going back to acquiring more seems a lot easier.

In order to play this game you must say goodbye to old identities, borrowed belief systems, approval from society and confront your carefully constructed illusions of certainty.

It will take you down a path of confronting your own conditioning. You must dissect all of your adaptations, all the roles you were rewarded for playing and the beliefs you’ve inherited from the world around you.

You will have to confront uncertainty. You must accept the fact that there may not be clear, concise answers to any of these questions. That there is no pre-written script, that maybe there is no meaning after all and that there is no authority over what self-authored meaning looks like. Humans hate uncertainty and uncertainty has to become your home in this game.

You must confront responsibility. That your choices shaped the direction of your life. It’s not society, circumstances or your parents that kept you in the game of survival or trapped in the endless pursuit of more - it was you.

So why even bother with the game of meaning?

I think the survival of our species depends on it.

Technological powers are increasing faster than our virtue. AI, cyber weapons and quantum computing will require meaning-level consciousness to wield responsibly.

“In understanding yourself, you understand the whole of humanity.” - Krishnamurti

I remain hopeful but there is no denying that humanity is going through some serious growing pains at the moment. We must make the jump to a new game.

The collective outer world is going through the same games that we do as individuals. Through a set of miracles, humans have managed to pull ourselves out of the game of survival (at least in the developed world).

Currently humanity is hooked on the game of more. We’re trapped in the loop of endless pursuit, just as many individuals are. Almost all of our leaders in business and in politics are not interested in the game of meaning. They got to where they are through the game of more so they are creating a future based on that game’s rules.

We are building, creating and acquiring new things/ideas/technologies/businesses that are meaningless. They only exist because they help us achieve more. We are focused on problems that we make up for ourselves in order to go on solving new problems that those problems cause.

In order for us to transcend, we need more of our leaders and role models playing the game of meaning. This does not mean we halt progress but that we measure progress differently.

Does this progress get us closer to understanding who we are, why we are here and how we should live. And is this moving more people out of the game of survival and the game of more into the game of meaning?

I do not claim to know what the meaning is, that is for each of us to find out for ourselves. But in the pursuit of meaning, many come to similar conclusions. That the core of the human being is not separate from our environment and the divine. That we are all one. When you reach those conclusions, a natural transformation follows with a renewed focus on compassion, humility, love and selflessness.

Which makes me believe that a future built on compassion, humility, love and selflessness is entirely possible. And it starts with more individuals choosing to participate in the game of meaning.

Maybe it’s not happiness we should be after but instead “life, liberty and the pursuit of meaning.”

As Socrates famously argued, “the unexamined life is not worth living”. A life lived without examination of meaning is a life only half lived. Survival and accumulation without reflection leaves us empty.

There is a greater game to be played and humanity needs you to play it, now more than ever.

Please Support Our Partners 🙏

Dreamfuel is offering a free mental performance coaching session for your entire team at your annual company kick-off, RKO or leadership offsite.

“Just wanted to tell you that yesterday was EPIC!!!!!! Unbelievable feedback.”

Due to coaching bandwidth this will be done on a first come, first serve basis. This is only for Wake Up Call subscribers and will only take place in Q1, you can organize your free team session here.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

I took a break this week from the fictional short story I’ve been writing called ‘The Sickness’. The above section took up all of my writing hours but it will be back next week.

Sharing a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson from Self Reliance:

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost - and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought.”

latest.podcast.episode 🎙

I have a new episode dropping tomorrow with Devon Warwick McDonald, it’s not one to miss. In the meantime, sharing a classic epsiode with the one and only Justin Welsh, CEO/Founder of Unsubscribe.

You can listen to the full episode here or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you enjoy the podcast, please think about leaving a review. Everything helps.

That’s it.

I wrote this edition from Goa, India. I feel grateful to be able to spend so much time in this wild, beautiful and wise country.

As always, I love to hear any thoughts, comments or feedback you have. I write to spark new thought and discourse so please fire away.

Thanks for rocking with me until the end.

✌️

Scott Barker

“Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself” - Herman Hesse

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #12 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. The dismantling of our ‘rites of passage’, why it matters and what we can do.

2. A continuation of my fictional short story, “The Sickness”, set in the near future.

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

I’m currently up in the tea plantations of Munnar, India. It’s a very beautiful place to write from.

Appreciate you all for leasing me this little space in your inbox. I hope it becomes a place for you to pause, reflect and think a little deeper - even if just for a moment.

Anyway, let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

Last week I outlined six reasons why we’re seeing burnout skyrocket and why professionals are having their ‘mid-life crisis’ earlier and earlier.

The full list includes:

1. Living compressed lives

2. Success arrived, meaning didn’t

3. The comparison engine

4. Work is not ‘just work’

5. Cumulate instability

6. Rites of passage

I want to spend this week thinking and writing about number six, directly linked to the conversation last week.

Rites of Passage

A rite of passage is a structured ritual that marks the end of one life stage and the beginning of another through challenge, reflection and communal recognition.

Throughout history we had things like:

• Vision quests

• Walkabouts

• Shamanic initiation

• The Massai Lion Hunt

• Guild initiations

• Oaths (like the hippocratic oath for doctors)

• Knighting ceremonies

• Mourning periods

• Becoming an Elder

• Fertility rites

Rites like these used to be a crucial part of a human’s personal story and transformation.

Historically these rites did three things:

1. They named change – “You are not who you were”

2. They witnessed it socially – “We see you”

3. They gave meaning to suffering – “This pain has purpose”

Without things like this, people can still evolve. But that evolution comes with a lot more pain/confusion and it happens silently/privately.

Now, of course, we still have milestones: how much money we have, promotions, degrees, buying real estate, number of followers, fitness goals, etc. but they are all quantitative and not symbolic.

Unlike a milestone, a rite of passage tells you when you have arrived, when you can close a chapter and what to focus on next.

The milestones above have no end, you can chase them endlessly so if you make those your ‘rites’ then they will only ever tell you one thing: keep going.

This has forced most of us into what anthropologists call ‘a liminal state’.

From wikipedia:

“In anthropology, liminality (from Latin limen 'a threshold')^[1] is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.^[2] During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold"^[3] between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).”

In other words, we’re stuck in limbo.

Instead of feeling like we’ve crossed a threshold, we experience the feeling of ‘Groundhog day’ where it all starts feeling the same and we ask “Is this it?”.

There’s a core pattern in most of these Rites of Passage:

You leave your old identity,

You experience discomfort/test/chaos,

You receive some wisdom,

You then re-enter society,

Your community witnesses the change.

I think the problem is most of us are trapped in the ‘experience discomfort/test/chaos’ phase which we were never meant to stay in for long. That’s why we’re seeing mass burnout, exhaustion and the feeling of being perpetually overwhelmed.

So why did this happen?

The easiest route is to blame some big, grand conspiracy to undermine group cooperation, force us into individualism and give more power to the elites.

I think that anyone who believes in conspiracies like that has never tried to organize large numbers of people. Getting large swaths of humans, cascading through generations, to all agree to dismantle these rites would be next to impossible. We can barely organize a strata council…

No, things like this happen slowly over a long period of time through a series of small collective decisions made again and again.

As many of us lost faith in the institutions (religions/gods of the past) that held up these traditions, we threw out the traditions with them ie. we threw the baby out with the bath water.

But we got it wrong.

We don’t have to worship indigenous spirituality to see the wisdom in and adopt the ‘walkabout’ ritual. Those can be separate ideas.

Another big reason is that technology has collapsed time and these rites require some stillness and silence, both of which are becoming more and more rare these days. Our constant stimulation and obsession with progress leaves no gaps, no boredom, no breaks, no endings and no beginnings.

The last piece is that capitalism does not benefit from people feeling like they have arrived. The system thrives on the idea that you are not enough as you are. Again, not some grand conspiracy, just truth. All you have to do is look at modern marketing (I happen to know it well) and you see that people buy things because they are dissatisfied with the way things are in their current life, they aspire to have a better life and they are terrified that they are falling behind in some way. It’s good for the economy when the ladder is infinite and there’s no true feeling of arrival.

Even with all of this, a few rites have survived into modern life:

• Baptism

• Bar/Bat Mitzvahs

• Weddings

• Birthdays

• Baby Shower/Gender Reveal

But the few examples we have are either heavily tied to a specific religion or they have a shadow of their former significance, many have become more about receiving gifts than truly witnessing someone entering a new phase of their life.

And we’ve stripped away the ‘challenge’ and ‘reflection’ piece of the rite of passage which are crucial pieces of the puzzle.

So what can we do?

Do what humans do best. Make up new stories.

All of these rites of passage of the past were just made up, so we can make up new ones.

You don’t even need everyone to go along with your new story, just a few people in your immediate surroundings.

You can make up rites just for your own small nuclear family, your extended family, your family/friends, your city block or your entire community. You don’t need to be seen by the whole world for this to be effective, just a handful of people you know/like/respect.

Get creative, use them to mark transformations that feel important to you, take them seriously, follow the core ‘rites patterns’ I listed above and bring some mythic quality back to your life.

Here’s an example to bring this to life:

There’s something I saw almost every day in my past life as a Co-founder/Partner at a VC firm.

There was a certain archetype I saw again and again. Typically, but not exclusively, male, aged between 45-65, who had been quite successful in their life, just hit a milestone, did not want to retire and almost immediately looked to ‘enter the arena’ again to build another business.

I often thought, “Why?”

You can see that they are tired. You can see the toll the last company had on their nerves. You know they have enough money.

They repeat phrases like:

“I love the game too much, I’m never going to retire.”

“I was just meant to do this, I’ll do this until I die.”

“Retire? I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

“If I was at home, I’d drive my family crazy.”

For the record, I have also said various versions of these sentences many times. But, at least for me, what I really meant was:

I would have no idea who I am if I stop achieving things.

Through many conversation, I have come to believe it’s because people don’t know who they are without being the achiever, the builder, the one who makes money. Being those things is what makes them feel useful and needed/wanted by the people around them and without that what role would they play?

Even at the pinnacle of what we deem ‘success’, they are still stuck in a liminal state. Not sure how to move forward so they go back to the game they know and feel comfortable in. Even if that game is starting to harm their health and relationships.

We can use this archetype as an example. What type of rite of passage could be helpful here?

After some level of success, imagine there was an acknowledgement or celebration from their little tribe consisting of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues.

The tribe let them know that it was a noble thing to sacrifice their time and health to acquire resources so that their family and friends could have opportunities and live comfortably. They show appreciation for the pain and struggle that they went through.

But we also tell them that we don’t need them to make those sacrifices anymore, they have accomplished what they set out to do and everyone around them is safe and secure.

Tell them that it’s ok for them to step into a new chapter.

The time of acquiring resources and wealth is over, let the next generation handle that from here. We give them permission to change the role and game they are playing.

Let them know that they hold things that are much more valuable to the tribe/society/community than money: their time, their skills and their wisdom.

Make them understand that their time, the skills they have acquired and the wisdom will not be wasted in this next chapter. Many of the same things that made them successful in business can help solve problems within their family, community and broader society.

The goal is to unlock their potential to higher order thinking that’s less myopic on solving just one specific goal (as most businesses are set up to do). The next phase is to be spent going inward and thinking about the larger issues we face internally and externally.

Then they would go into a period of solitude for a month somewhere in nature to reflect on their past journey and begin to picture a new role for themselves. How do they want to be remembered? Where would they want to spend their time if money was no object? What skills do they want to pass on and how? How can they contribute to their society beyond capital? What have they been missing by giving 80-90% of their brain capacity to capital generation every day?

Nobody is forcing anyone to change.

But they emerge with permission to shed their old identity and step into a new one if they choose. Then the insatiable striving for more becomes a conscious choice, not an unconscious one.

Many would choose to keep playing their old role but I believe a surprising amount would welcome a new one.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

This is a continuation of a fictional short story I’ve been writing called ‘The Sickness’. If you haven’t read the initial two chapters, I would recommend you go back and start there. It starts two editions back below (section two):

—

Admittedly, it had been an intense start to the year but hitting his annual limit of Gab only six weeks into the year?

That’s gotta be a new record.

2066 was going to be the year things finally slowed down for him though. He’d sort out his health and some of these habits when he had a little more time.

Just like everything else, drugs had evolved alongside people.

Humans will always look for ways to escape and ways to optimize.

And, as for right now, he was on a one-way escape mission to: I-no-longer-want-to-think-or-feel-a-fukn-thing-ville

Of course, hitting his annual limits had put a minor wrench in how quickly he could complete this mission but he was always up for a challenge if it meant the noise in his head would stop.

He walked through the streets and lucky for him, Born Ones weren’t bombarded with the advertisements that usually went straight into your AiA. The streets were loud, bright and chaotic but compared to his day of charging they felt almost serene.

Nighttime was his solace. The hours from 11pm-4am, when most people were sleeping and his AiA stopped incessantly chattering, is the only time he felt like himself again. Well, after two old-fashioneds, three injections of Gab and seven beers he felt like himself anyway.

And to think we almost lost alcohol in the 30s?

In the early 2030s, there was an unprecedented drop in alcohol consumption and it looked like humanity was finally going to say goodbye to its favorite poison.

But then in 37’, NeuroOne dropped and we all know how that went…

Shortly after that first cycle of adoption, alcohol sales went through the roof and have been steadily climbing again ever since.

As he looked up, he saw the endless rows of neon lights on both sides of the streets. He’d hit Consumer Row, the entertainment district for the masses. He hated walking here.

Just then a group of six or seven young Consumers stumbled out of one of the pixel pubs all with glazed, distant eyes. It looked like they hadn’t unplugged in days.

You could always tell who the Consumers were because they chose to stay in their haptic suits all the time. He didn’t get it but somewhere along the line, the suits had become fashionable for them. And having them on all the time gave them the added benefit of being able to feel things through their AiA, even on the go.

The AiAs had limits though. The inserts that everyone had on their wrist and shoulder could only process so much data so if you could afford it, you had an expanse-processor at home. If you couldn’t, you went to a pixel pub.

There, you could experience a virtual reality that was completely indistinguishable from our lived experience. Pair that with a haptic suit and there’s nothing they couldn’t experience.

I guess we all had our ways of escaping.

The Luddites had their Soma.

The Consumers had their Pixel Pubs.

The Learned had their Pharmaceuticals.

And Born Ones had Body Codes like Gab.

With alcohol being the great unifying poison that we all shared hand in hand.

He turned down an alley, he was getting close. Thank god. His anxiety levels were through the roof. He quickly scanned his inbox to try to quell that anxiety.

“You have 62 new messages. Are you not going to reply?” piped in his AiA.

Well that backfired. “Does it look like I’m going to reply?”

“Your first meeting is at 6am, that’s going to come quickly.”

He never knew where to look when he wanted to give his AiA a dirty look, technically the holographic screen was on his wrist but the noise came from the insert on his shoulder so it felt more natural to shoot the evil eye over his right shoulder.

“Take the night off, Hux. Go do whatever you do when you’re not pretending to be my mom.”

He opened the door.

It was busy. He liked this place for the exact opposite reason: it was never busy.

He hadn’t been here in awhile and it looked like some Learned had found out about this place. They always stared. They never approached him but he always felt as if they wanted something from him.

“An old fashioned and a beer please.”

He’d have to do the whole song and dance.

Technically you weren’t supposed to sell Gab or any other Body Codes. Limited consumption was allowed but it was supposed to be distributed by the specific bio-pharma companies that had contracts with the Founders.

As the bartender approached, he shot him an AiA message: “3s Gb”

He turned around with the drinks, went to the back room and emerged again quickly scanning the room before dropping off his two drinks and three small vials.

The wave of relief that came from simply seeing the vials was a small preview of what was to come next.

—-

“Who…what?”

He shook his head, he was feeling confused. Confused but calm, very calm. Like a warm blanket was covering him from the inside.

“More people have disappeared again. I had a guy in here tell me that two people from his work have just *poof* vanished in just the last four months. You ever check out some of the theories that are out there around all these disappearings?”

The bartender was talking to him and he was doing his best to listen but he really didn’t care about anything he was saying. He really didn’t care about anything at the moment. In that moment, all the chaos of the outside world had stopped.

He looked at the time on his wrist, 2:17am.

It was late. It didn’t matter, he felt happy.

“No, yea that’s crazy. Hey, just one second mate. I gotta make a call.” His speech was slurred, almost like someone had put him into slow motion.

“Call Maeve”

Nothing. He tried again.

This time she picked up.

“Now you call? I guess it’s better late than never.”

“Hey…? What are you doing? What do you mean?”

“Seriously?”

“No, what? I mean I just called because I was thinking about you and I want to see you.”

“It’s Valentine’s Day, you idiot.”

*click*

…

(to be continued)

Please Support Our Partners:

Dreamfuel is offering a free mental performance coaching session for your entire team at your annual company kick-off, RKO or leadership offsite.

“Just wanted to tell you that yesterday was EPIC!!!!!! Unbelievable feedback.”

Due to coaching bandwidth this will be done on a first come, first serve basis. This is only for Wake Up Call subscribers and will only take place in Q1, you can organize your free team session here.

latest.podcast.episode 🎙

In my latest interview I sit down with my good friend, Erik Kostelnik, Co-Founder of Navi and Dualmind AI.

Erik has built and sold multiple businesses but still manages to be one of the more grounded humans I know. We talk about what happens after the exit, the identity shift, the silence, the need to re-anchor.

We talk about fatherhood and the myth of ‘having it all together’. Then we go down a rabbit hole about dopamine hijacking & what it means to build consumer products that actually make people feel better (not worse). I always enjoy my conversations with Erik and I think you will too.

Full episode here or check it out wherever you 🎧 to your pods. If you enjoy the pod, please take a second to rate it. It really helps, thanks.

That’s it, that’s all from me.

I’ve really been enjoying writing these lately. I think the weird jump into fiction gave me a bit of a renewed love for writing.

As always, any and all thoughts, comments and feedback are welcome.

I appreciate you being here.

btw If you’re ever curious about the places I’m visiting, you can follow me @scottybarks on Instagram to see some of the spots that I’m lucky enough to write these newsletters from.

✌️

Scott Barker

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” - Simone Neil

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #12 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How life compression is causing an earlier ‘mid-life crisis’

1. A continuation of the short story, “The Sickness”

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

I’m currently writing this from Fort Kochi, India. It’s an interesting blending of old colonial architecture and a more modern Indian art scene.

After the weekend, my girlfriend and I will be getting out of the city and heading to Munnar. Back to nature, wildlife, waterfalls and endless tea plantations/gardens. It looks like the perfect environment to write.

I’m still feeling very grateful for the recent growth of this newsletter and somehow it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

It’s funny how the number of people who read something can have an effect on your writing. If you’re not careful, that simple fact can distract you from your original intent.

I caught myself a few times writing for the reader rather than myself.

I also want to thank everyone who took the time to comment or message me their support for the fictional short story I started last week.

It’s been fun to try my hand at writing fiction. It happened very naturally. I was trying to articulate multiple threads/ideas at once and it somehow ended up forming into a story.

Each week, I’ll add a chapter and continue to build out the world. I have a lot of ideas.

If fiction is not your thing, feel free to skip over section two.

Anyway, let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

Everywhere I look these days, there are people having what looks like a ‘mid-life crisis’.

But it’s happening earlier and earlier to many folks that aren’t even technically close to ‘mid-life’.

This existential crisis of meaning used to happen between the ages of fifty to sixty but now I see the same signals happening to folks as young as twenty-five.

Caveat: I’m aware that part of this is due to the red car theory but even when I account for that, it’s impossible to ignore.

It got me thinking, why does this seem to be happening prematurely and more frequently?

I’ve come up with six potential reasons why:

1. Living compressed lives

2. Success arrived, meaning didn’t

3. The comparison engine

4. Work is no longer ‘just work’

5. No rites of passage

6. Cumulative instability

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll explore a few of them.

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Up first: Living compressed lives

-

Previous generations moved through life in a somewhat sequential order.

There were three distinct chapters.

1. Learning (School)

2. Creating/Building (Work/Marriage/Kids)

3. Meaning (Retirement)

It used to be that you would spend the first third of your life learning how to operate in the world, the second third building a life and the final third searching for meaning in that life.

That’s not the case anymore.

We are now tasked to do all three phases simultaneously.

Due to the pace of technological advancement, our learning phase is never done. If you stop learning for one second then you’re at the risk of becoming obsolete.

Because of rising costs of goods/services, increase in lifestyle and comparison to others, many young people are entering phase two early through content creation or a side hustle (or two) while they are still in high school.

And with increased access to information on psychology, spirituality and modern health/wellness, we’re taught that without ‘meaning’ in our lives that it’s all pointless. So we start looking for meaning as soon as our brains are developed.

Since you need more to retire comfortably, people are staying in the workforce longer when they are supposed to be slowing down, examining themselves and the world around them.

All three stages have become merged/blended which has led to cognitive overload.

It’s not that the human story has changed.

We all need to learn, we all need to build/create and we all need meaning.

But we weren’t supposed to do it all at once.

We’ve compressed the entire book into one chapter that we’re re-reading over & over.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

This is a continuation of a fictional short story called ‘The Sickness’ that I started writing last week. If you haven’t read the initial introduction, I would strongly recommend you go back and start there (section two below).

—

He would typically spend twelve hours a day plugged in or ‘charging’.

Somewhere along the way, through an admittedly impressive act of marketing, the colloquial word for being connected to the network became charging.

So, if you weren’t connected, it felt like you were somehow losing battery life. Which wasn’t far from the truth. Regardless of social standing, the more time you spent connected to the network, the quicker you rose in society.

The old adage “Your network is your net worth” had been adapted to “The network is your net worth”. It reflected how things worked now. Back in the day, humans needed to rely on other humans to solve problems and create opportunities. Not anymore.

Over reliance on other humans was an inefficiency that The Founders corrected. Humanity was now modelled after machines putting speed, productivity and efficiency above all.

The less humans involved in an endeavour, the faster the individual could go.

Companies still existed, but not like they used to. They were no longer vehicles for cooperation, but rather antiquated frameworks primarily used for tax benefits. It was not uncommon for one person and an army of AiAs (AI assistants) to own an entire sector of the economy. Though that dominance never lasted long.

Beyond the ‘significant six’ mega-corps that owned the LLMs, chips and robotics factories, the shelf life of an average company was only a year or two. Competition for the few remaining uncontrolled economic opportunities or the contracts with The Six was fierce among the Born Ones.

With the pace of innovation evolving at a now mind-bending rate, start-ups that embraced the latest updates could easily overthrow incumbents in a matter of months (sometimes weeks). And that was only if you were lucky enough that one of The Six didn’t turn their head to whatever problem you were solving.

That’s why he chose to spend most of his time investing tokens and social credits on behalf of other Born Ones. One thing that would never change is that wealth could never be accumulated and multiplied fast enough. As soon as anyone had a surplus of tokens or credit, people wanted their ‘more’ to become ‘even more’. And that’s where he came in.

His job seemed complex, in reality, much of it was a mixture of picking the right algorithms and guesswork. It didn’t require all that much brain power but what it did require was time and speed.

He was really there to make one or two decisions a week but tens of millions of credits could be riding on that one decision so if he was not charging at the exact second that decision was to be made then his returns would suffer.

Not overly stimulating work but the intense pressure made it feel like life or death. Sometimes it was. There were many stories of credit or token managers who stayed charging for days at a time with no break. In more than a few cases those had ended in heart attacks, extreme exhaustion or suicide.

Society would often give undue credit to the Born Ones for their intellect or creativity when the real difference was simply that they would push their minds/bodies further than most could even comprehend. But they were all taught early on in ‘simulation training’ to lean into the myth and hide behind perceived complexity.

It’s helpful to know that once a Born One is identified, they are immediately given privileges that aren’t afforded to the rest of society. Nobody pushed back. We needed them to keep the Great Wheels of capitalism turning so we didn’t want to slow them down with too many unnecessary rules.

Two of the biggest advantages were: the AiA override function and the special simulation training starting at the age of two.

As part of their simulation training, they were given access to parts of the LLMs that weren’t available to the masses.

This is where they were taught to use complex language when describing what they did, which was a good way to fend off competition from any Learned Ones that had grand illusions of trying to climb up the ladder. Always make it seem harder than it is.

The ‘Three D’s’ were also hammered into their heads. When you’re in a competition, you always want to have your competitors either 1. distracted 2. doing 3. divided.

Don’t ever give them time to think.

“Keep them distracted, keep them doing and keep them divided.” The voice of his AiA teacher would often pop into his head whenever he was at a crossroads with his business.

Just then, his stomach started to rumble.

Like many, he often forgot to eat when he was charging but the pain in his abdomen told him it might already be time to unplug.

“How long have I been in?”

“13 hours. 17 minutes. 54 seconds.”

“How much are we up?”

“Up 5.2% on tokens and down 3.5% on credits, but still up 11% on credits for the week.”

All in a day’s work, he thought.

“Ok, start my Relax Protocol.”

He was usually less curt to his AiA, they were actually pretty good friends but lately he just didn’t have the energy for pleasantries. He’d apologize later, they’d understand.

“I will not be able to initiate step three of the protocol.”

“Why?”, although he already knew the answer.

“You have reached your limit.”

“‘Override.”

“You have been overriding your daily limit so often that you’ve already hit your annual limit. Even you cannot override annual limits.”

It was only February. Fuck.

“Ok, we’re going out.”

He threw on his jacket and headed for the door.

(to be continued)

Special Offer: Our partners at Dreamfuel are offering a free mental performance coaching session for your entire team at your annual company kick-off, RKO or leadership offsite (only for Wake Up Call subscribers).

Due to coaching bandwidth this will be done on a first come, first serve basis. This will only take place in Jan/Feb, you can organize your free team session here.

latest.podcast.episode 🎙

Alongside interviewing guests and a few solo reflections, every now and again I drop a guided breath-work, visualization or meditation on the podcast feed.

Yesterday we dropped one of my favorites. It’s a quick breath-work session followed by a guided visualization of the year ahead, perfect to kick off the new year.

If you enjoy listening to the pod, please give us a rating on Spotify - it all helps with the almighty algos.

It’s late here.

Time to get some sleep.

Thanks for rocking with me, see you next week.

✌️

Scott Barker

“The most radical thing any of us can do at this time is to be fully present to what is happening in the world” - Joanna Marcy

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #10 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. The lessons I’ve been learning from Jiddu Krishnamurti

2. The beginning of a new fictional short story set in the year 2066 called ‘The Sickness’

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

I’m writing this from the cliffs of Varkala, India 👋

Somehow this newsletter doubled over the last five days so there are a lot of new folks here.

And for that, I feel very grateful.

I decided to post my first note on Substack and it went a little viral. Up until now, I’ve been hesitant to really promote this newsletter beyond a social post here and there.

In the past, I’ve mostly written about sales, marketing, fundraising, tech or go-to-market strategies which felt a lot less scary to talk about and put out into the world.

But, whatever this is, it started as a form of therapy for me. I was writing for myself. And much of it is deeply personal.

When I began I was lost and completely disillusioned with the world. Writing this has helped me to understand myself and the world around me a little bit better.

It was about understanding my truth (at least how I see it at the time of writing) and an outlet for creativity. Turns out that sharing that truth with the world is quite terrifying.

There was a fear of judgement so I was kind of hiding my recent writing and blindly hoping that the right people would stumble upon it somehow.

I’ve been writing this for the last nine months and it took me until last week to finally make the decision to let the Substack community know about my story and the journey I’ve been on.

The outpouring of support has been incredible and a little overwhelming.

Here’s the quick refresher on my story for all the new subscribers:

• I was obsessed with success, money and status my whole life and chased the endless ‘more’ for the last fifteen years.

• I became the youngest director at a four billion dollar tech company, co-founded a venture capital fund, raised 100m, got the corner office with a view, bought the house, bought the car.

• I got everything I thought I ever wanted and was the most miserable I’ve ever been.

• My life became a never-ending cycle of: perform, escape, sleep, repeat and eventually I became completely disillusioned with the life I had created for myself.

• I stepped down from the fund, sold my house (and everything in it), put whatever was left in a backpack and took off to go look for some answers.

• For the last nine months I’ve been travelling the world, interviewing people about their ‘wake up calls’ and writing this newsletter.

It’s been interesting to see how many people relate to my story in their own way but I’m always a little conflicted when people do.

Usually when people resonate it’s because they might be really going through it, they might feel lost, they might be questioning the life they have built or perhaps they are just seeking a more meaningful way to live their next chapter.

Typically something is not working and they are looking to make some changes.

And I know that usually before we rebuild, change or shift there is a stage where we can go through an immense amount of pain and confusion. If you’re in that stage, I see you. Keep looking inward. It will get better.

The goal of this newsletter remains the same:

To help people wake up before their wake up call.

wake up to what’s truly important in life.

wake up from the ‘sickness of more’.

wake up from the endless chasing.

wake up from trying to impress others.

wake up from the unconscious daily decisions that drive us forward.

wake up from old programming.

wake up from the daily drama of life.

wake up from fear and anxiety.

wake up from the characters we play.

wake up to more stillness and simplicity.

wake up to the beauty that’s all around us.

Now I do want to make it very clear that I do not have the answers and I likely never will but I am trying my best to figure it out.

I also do not claim to be ‘awake’, it takes constant daily practice to stay present, to stay conscious and stay aware. Some days I do better than others.

There will be very little in the form of real advice here. If you were looking for a quick prescription to the good life, unfortunately you won’t find that here (but please let me know if you have it).

What you will read about is my personal journey of trying to figure out what makes a full and meaningful life. A journey of looking for more peace, joy and contentment. The ideas that I’m thinking about. Wrestling with my own personal story/past. Lessons I’m stumbling on along the way. And some unfiltered creative expression.

Some weeks I’ll write a point of view, a journal entry, an essay, a fictional story, a poem or something in-between. I switch up my style of writing to whatever feels right on that day so please bear with me.

I also have no idea what I’m doing here so there’s a sense of freedom in that. The only thing that stays consistent is the two sections: one piece of writing will be for the mind and one will be for the soul.

Thanks for being here, let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

A few weeks back a funny thing happened to me while I was staying at an Ashram.

A woman I had never met before walked by me, caught my eye and immediately asked me if I had ever read any Krishnamurti.

No greeting, no hello, she just couldn’t help but blurt that out.

Turns out I hadn’t. In fact, I had never actually heard of this Indian orator and philosopher before. But I could tell how excited she was about talking about it so I stopped and we had an interesting conversation. At the end of it, she decided that she wanted me to have the book she was reading by him called “Think on These Things”.

It felt like the book had somehow found me so I took my time reading every page. I was hooked and once I finished, I went out and bought another book of his. I’ve been diving in ever since.

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in 1895 but somehow his advice and commentary on the world seems like it was written for today. He’s a fascinating figure and thinker.

I’ll do my best to distil some of the main ideas he talks about but, if you find them interesting, I recommend you go straight to the source because I won’t do him justice.

His main point is this:

Truth is a pathless land.

Most of what he talks about comes back to that statement.

1. No path to follow, no guru, no authority

He believes that we should reject all spiritual authority, including himself. This wasn’t just talk either, he actually disbanded all of his followers at one point. The idea is that no one tradition, teacher, method, belief or practice can set you free. As soon as we follow another that becomes conditioning and we begin borrowing their freedom.

We must be our own guide.

2. Psychological freedom is the real revolution

There are a lot of complex problems in the world both political and economic but he teaches that at their root these are all psychological problems. Society, as it is, is simply a projection of our inner world (collectively). If we try to make changes without addressing the root then all we do is rearrange our suffering. If we’re able to change the structure of our consciousnesses then society changes naturally.

3. The self is the problem.

Krishnamurti believes that ‘the self’ is just an amalgamation of memory, conditioning, fear, desire and compassion. Our self is essentially our past experiences being projected into the future. In order to see the truth, we need to get beyond the self.

4. Awareness without judgement

He talks about how we are all obsessed with changing what we see, our surroundings and our lives. Instead he encourages us not to judge, try to improve or escape what is and to observe it instead. Once we are able to fully observe, without choosing or judging, then transformation within us will happen effortlessly.

5. Freedom is only in the present moment

A number of times he brings up the fact that many spiritual systems and beliefs instill this idea that if you do ‘x’ or believe ‘y’ then one day you will become free. They are teaching that we must postpone our freedom. Whereas Krishnamurti talks about how freedom is more of a ‘now or never’ situation. It will only ever exist in the present moment. If you are trying to become something so that one day you will be free, that is ‘the self’ still in complete control.

6. Fear, desire and pleasure are just thoughts

Of course, we need our thoughts to navigate practical life. The problem is when we completely identify ourselves with our thoughts and let them dominate our psyche. He goes on to say that “thought alone creates fear by projecting the future”, “thought creates pleasure by repeating a memory.” and “thought cannot solve problems that thought created.”. We’ll likely never be rid of fear, desire or the pursuit of pleasure but if we can find the place where thoughts end then we can have a reprieve from these aims and see things as they are.

7. Love is not attachment

The belief that wherever the self is, love cannot be present. He believes that love only exists when there is no fear, no dependence and no possession whatsoever. Easy to understand, very hard to put into practice.

8. Meditation is not a technique

I’ve been deepening my meditation practice while on this trip but Krishnamurti would say that I’m missing the point. Meditation is not a practice or a discipline. It is a natural state of deep attention in our daily life where we watch, listen and relate to everything around us.

That was all a little heady, I don’t think I’ll try to sum up someone’s life work again in one section but this man was certainly on to something.

But as he would say, don’t follow any of this advice, go find out your own truth.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

I almost didn’t include this section because it’s a big departure from my normal form of writing. It was a complex topic that I thought would be more fun to write and read in story form.

Below is the start of a short story I call “The Sickness”. If you like it, I’ll continue writing out a chapter each week. If not, we’ll go back to regular scheduled programming.

—

The doctor proudly handed the child to his parents, “Congratulations, he has the sickness.”

His parents were overjoyed, “Are you sure?”

The doctor nodded.

He knew the parents would be ecstatic, this was big news for them. He didn’t want to steal their moment. But the doctor had seen this story play out many times before. It always ended the same.

They all knew what that meant for most kids who were diagnosed.

But flashes of graduating early, dominating sports teams, ivy league schools, valedictorian speeches, respect, political power, celebrity status and money (lots of money) flipped through his parent’s minds instead.

The humans that had ‘the sickness’ often became the most respected and revered. It was widely celebrated across every continent. Although controversial, we had found complex ways to teach kids ‘the sickness’ even if they weren’t born with it but it never took hold quite as well.

After the initial boom of the AI revolution, humans became lazy. They outsourced every task including thinking. Every decision was made for them. And they chose to spend their time consuming and distracting themselves.

This quickly became a problem. With few entrepreneurs, creatives and artists left to write, create and build original ideas, the scripture written into our divine LLMs was getting more and more synthetic.

There was very little new human data being created beyond the ever-expanding consumption data which, of course, only benefitted ‘The Great Founders’. And even they knew that without more history being written by natural humans that soon all the synthetic inputs would produce answers that humans would no longer understand. It was already happening. Thousands of new languages had been created by the models to communicate with one another, most of which had not yet been deciphered into English.

Humanity needed a solution or we’d be left behind.

It was less than a decade ago when capitalism began to fail, the LLMs stopped making sense, growth had stalled and the world felt unstable. That was when a group of scientists first identified ‘the sickness’. The people born with it would be the solution for our failing economies and global unrest.

They had a unique set of attributes that made them up for the task. People with ‘the sickness’ shared four identifying qualities 1. had an insatiable drive for more 2. would sacrifice everything else in their life in pursuit of a goal 3. were never satisfied and always restless 4. had a deep need to impress others.

Each had varying degrees of these four pillars but whatever concoction they had, it almost always turned into growth and success. Many years ago, that word had a few different meanings but those had been lost with time.

Success was now only and purely synonymous with wealth/status.

The pursuit of wealth and status kept the great wheels in motion. And so, those were the orders that one should devote their life to entirely. There was no higher calling.

‘The Great Founders’ of the New Republic went to great lengths to try to replicate and spread the sickness. It became humanity’s battle cry.

“The Sickness is The Cure” was plastered across the campaign trail.

And since all those in positions of power already had ‘the sickness’, the ‘Founders’ used their position and their vast consumption data to quickly rise to control much of the world.

Stillness, silence, contemplation and reflection became the enemy.

The world had seen what humans did when they were given free time so any time spent disconnected was demonized. If you were not connected, consuming or creating you were seen as a burden on society.

Most of the countries and borders had disappeared already by this time but society had reorganized into a new hierarchy system broken into four buckets (in order of importance):

1. The born ones

2. The learned sick

3. The consumers

4. The luddites

This story will be about a child that came into this world a ‘born one’.

Born into a small subset that was born with ‘the sickness’, this class held much of the wealth and power in the world. The pressure was great but the privileges were vast. They were second only to the ‘The Great Founders’. These were the creators.

The learned sick often worked for the ‘born ones’. Through years and years of daily consuming/training, often eight to twelves hours a day, they had been officially indoctrinated into ‘the sickness’. Struggle and hardship were shown to help the ‘learned sick’ climb the ranks so some of ‘the learned’ who had especially challenging upbringings could sometimes go on to surpass the born ones. These were the builders.

Most of humanity still fell into the third bucket known as ‘the consumers’. They contributed their consumption data and were compensated by ‘The Great Founders’ based on how many hours they consumed. The more they consumed and bought, the better chance they had of moving up to the ‘learned’, although it was becomingly increasingly rare. Without customers, capitalism falls apart so this was seen as a necessary and noble way to spend your life. Though, if you dropped below 6 hours a day, you were in danger of losing your digital rights. These were the customers.

And then there were ‘the luddites’. ‘The luddites’ refused to stay connected and so held no worth or meaning in society. They did not create new data strands, they did not build upon that data and they did not consume any data. Since they did not contribute in any way, they were forced to give up their digital rights which meant no ID, no token wallets, no personal AI, no satellite wi-fi, no government log-ins whatsoever. Most chose (or were forced) to live away from society in ‘Lud Camps’, often deep in unforgiving nature with no technology. These were the outcasts.

____

He opened his eyes.

His sleep protocol was malfunctioning again. It was the third time this week but he was used to it by now. He felt the familiar prick of his daily shots just below his shoulder.

“Another one” he spoke aloud.

“You have exceeded your recommended dosage to avoid dependency ” a voice said from his wrist.

“Override.”

Many of the perks of being a ‘born one’ were bullshit but his override function was something he never took for granted, particularly when it came to his daily shots.

“Do you want to go online now? There are 42 decisions that need to be made as soon as possible.”

His AiA (AI assistant) had been in ‘meetings’ all night with other AiAs. Sometimes he wondered why he even needed to make the final decision. It was rare that he deviated from the path that they suggested.

He sighed, turned over and braced himself for the day ahead.

“Sure, let’s go in.”

….

(to be continued)

latest.podcast.episode 🎙

In my latest interview I sit down with the legendary Sam Jacobs, CEO and Founder of Pavilion.

We unpack what it means to stay grounded when everything around you is accelerating. Sam shares the hard-earned lessons that came after being fired, humbled, and forced to face all the different parts of himself.

We talk about fatherhood, ego, reinvention, and the structures that keep you from drifting. About the danger of believing your own hype. And about the quiet, daily routines that end up turning into your life.

Check out the full episode here.

Special Offer: Our partners at Dreamfuel are offering a free mental performance coaching session for your entire team at your annual company kick-off or RKO (only for Wake Up Call subscribers).

Due to coaching bandwidth this will be done on a first come, first serve basis. This will only take place in Jan/Feb, you can organize your free team session here.

I’ll be incredibly impressed if you actually made it this far.

I’m not sure starting a new, fictional short story right out of the gate with so many new subscribers here is the move, yet here we are.

Thanks for indulging me.

Appreciate you, see you next week ✌️

Scott Barker

“It is not faith that saves man, but faithfulness; not creed, but deed; not theology, but sanctification” - Abraham Joshua Heschel

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #9 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How we can use constraint and abstinence to increase the joy in our lives

2. A beautiful letter from Ram Dass

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

The end of the year is a time for reflection and gratitude.

When I started sharing my journey openly, talking about my experiences and writing about my learnings I didn’t know if anyone would care.

I was ‘the venture capital guy’, ‘the tech guy’ or ‘the sales guy’ and I figured people would want me to stay in my lane: “go back to talking about go-to-market strategy, AI in sales or how to fundraise.”

But that’s not where my head (or heart) is right now…and I’ve learned, through all of you, that I’m not alone in wanting to explore the inner and outer world more deeply.

The idea behind this project remains the same:

Is it possible to help people wake-up before their wake-up call?

I think we’re all just in varying forms of waking up to our highest potential.

It’s not a linear process, there’s no scoreboard, there’s no winner and there’s no end.

Just a series of learning, remembering, forgetting and remembering again.

We can feel on top of the world or we can be suffering deeply, in both cases, sometimes we need a little help remembering.

Of course you cannot eliminate suffering from someone’s life, nor should you want to, suffering is a necessary tool for growth and change.

But perhaps by sharing more openly/honestly, we can shorten how long someone suffers (or ‘forgets’) before they decide to make a positive change in their life.

And through sharing ideas/practices that have worked for me/others who are on the other side of their wake-up call, we can give people the hope and tools to get through theirs.

We’re all on our own journey, I do my best to not give advice, I’ll never claim to have the answers but I will continue to share what’s working for me and the new ideas that I’m wrestling with.

Thank you all for supporting me in that mission this year.

Anyway, let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

I was always in a rush to add things into my life.

More felt like progress.

Start a new venture. Learn a new skill. Build a new side hustle. Record more episodes. Add something to my morning routine. Spend more time in the gym. More responsibilities. More activities.

I just kept stacking and stacking until the load inevitably became unmanageable.

It took me stepping away from everything to finally comprehend what people actually meant by “addition by subtraction”.

You can gain more (time, focus, clarity, better results) by removing clutter, obligations or inefficiencies rather than adding more things.

Have you heard of The Ewing Theory?

The term was coined by sportswriter Bill Simmons who observed that the New York Knicks often played better when their star player, Patrick Ewing, was injured or sidelined.

Without Ewing, the rest of the team was forced to take on greater responsibility, come together and rise to the occasion.

This same idea can take place in our individual lives. Just as teams can flourish when their star player steps away, the human system can organize into a higher order when excess is removed.

Recently I wrote about my experience of practicing silence while I was in an Ashram in India (full piece here). By removing something as mission critical as speech, after a few days, I found that my critical thinking, connection to self and creativity exploded.

Which led me to analyze other areas of my life. What else could I remove?

Not analyzing in a way where I’m simply auditing my responsibilities/activities and removing the negative things or vices from my life. That’s just common sense.

But what happens if I remove (or limit) even perceived positive things in my life?

I never viewed talking, reading or writing as negative in any way and yet I saw a tremendous amount of positive benefit from giving them up for a short period of time while I was in silence.

When you stop distracting yourself through consuming new information, the act of just sitting on a park bench in the sun by yourself can feel like a holy experience.

Like many of the ideas that are finally hitting home for me, this concept is not new.

Voluntary constraint as a path to increased clarity, strength and aliveness has a long cross-cultural lineage of traditions across stoicism, buddhism, christianity, hinduism, judaism, islam, yoga/tantra, daoism, minimalism, etc.

You can find many examples throughout history of:

1. Restraint of Speech (Silence)

2. Sexual Restraint

3. Solitude & Withdrawal

4. Material Simplicity (voluntary poverty)

5. Sensory Deprivation/Reduction

6. Thought and Attention Discipline

7. Restraint of Food (Fasting)

For many of us, I believe more of our problems are caused by abundance than scarcity. When just about everything you need for survival is a click away, there aren’t many constraints in our life.

But we need constraints because constraints create contrast in our lives. That contrast is what allows appreciation to grow. And appreciation breeds meaning.

I think this is part of the reason we experience so much joy as children. There are built-in constraints in our lives that are unavoidable.

I remember being a kid, it’s Friday night, my dad has just picked me up from a friend’s house and we’re about to go to Blockbuster to pick out a movie to watch as a family accompanied by my mom’s famous homemade pizza. I am in absolute bliss. Why?

Yes, I enjoy a good movie. Yes, I like a good pizza. Yes, it feels good to be surrounded by family. But I don’t think that it’s just the set of circumstances that made it feel so special.

I can re-create the exact same set of circumstances with the same people now and it will not feel even close to the same. Is it that adults just naturally feel less joy? I don’t think so.

But as adults, we have much less constraints in our life. We can watch a new movie every day if we want. We can order a pizza any day of the week. We can bring our family together (or at least call/Facetime them) anytime.

As a kid you cannot do those things on command, so through constraint you feel the contrast between having those things and not having those things much more intensely. That contrast makes us appreciate those things a lot more. And when we fully appreciate something we create deeper meaning behind it.

Constraint can lead to deeper meaning.

Where in your life can you experiment with voluntary constraint?

💪 Special Offer: Our partners at Dreamfuel are doing something big to help teams kick off the New Year right. They are offering a free mental performance coaching session for your entire team at your annual company kick-off or RKO.

Due to coaching bandwidth this will be done on a first come, first serve basis. This will only take place in be available Jan/Feb, you can organize your free team session here.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

for.and.from.the.body. 🫂

The final session of my three part Wellness Series is taking place next week. In my eyes, it’s the perfect way to kick off the new year with increased focus and clarity.

You can register for free here.

Attendee feedback:

“I honestly didn’t expect to feel that much from it but the way it was guided made it feel safe but still intense in a good way. I actually felt my whole body let go when we hit the deeper rounds. Came out feeling lighter”

“I feel so calm and focused.”

“That was so sick, such a great way to start the day.”

“That breathing session yesterday was amazing.”

Join us for our final visualization and breathwork session.

latest.podcast.episode 🎙

I’ve started dropping a few guided visualizations and meditations directly on the Wake Up Call podcast feed. These are meant to be interactive sessions that you can come back to and revisit anytime you need to increase your energy, clarity or focus.

Take twenty minutes out of your day to put your inner game first.

That’s all from me.

Enjoy the last forty eight hours of 2025 . Whether you’re new here or you’ve been rocking with me since the beginning, thank you.

It’s been a heck of a year…

Scott Barker

“Simplicity is the consequence of inner clarity”
— Eckhart Tolle

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #8 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How technology is driving all of the changes in society and what we can do about it

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

I hope you don’t read this one.

Ideally you’ve shut your laptop until after the holidays and you’re enjoying some well-deserved time with your friends and family.

If not, then here we are.

Last week I shared a few of my thoughts around the increasingly rapid pace of technological progression and how we need to become conscious of the trade-offs we make every time we bring a new piece of tech into our lives.

If you haven’t given it a read yet, you can do so here.

In this edition, I’ll attempt to explore some ideas on what we can do about it and why it’s more important than ever that we start to participate in building the future.

Let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

There is a utopian future path we can go down that’s brought on by technology.

That’s on the table.

But, in my opinion, it will be tough to get there though if we don’t collectively start to make some conscious decisions.

My main point last week was:

Right now almost all of our major societal changes are being driven by technology. A new technology is invented and it molds/shapes our society and behaviour, whereas I believe it should be the other way around.

Humanity should decide the world that we want to live in and build technology that brings us closer to that reality. Just because we can build a new technology does not mean we should.

In other words, we’ve rapidly shifted from:

—

Humans shaping tools and society.

To:

Tools shaping humans and society.

—

That is a really big change.

I’ll try to hammer this home by showcasing a few changes that humans actually chose (or intentionally pushed) over the last 50 years vs. the changes technology imposed.

A few changes we choose:

*we still have a long way to go on most of these but the headway that we have made took a tremendous amount of effort: organizing, sacrifice, persuasion, often against the systems in place.

• Greater racial equality under law

• Disability rights and accessibility standards

• Women’s participation in all sectors of the workforce normalized

• Expansion of international human rights law

• Strengthening of child protection laws

• Environmental regulation

• Anti-corruption frameworks, consumer protection laws and data-privacy laws

• Decline of stigmas around therapy

• Animal welfare ethics

• Global humanitarian aid forms

A few changes that technology imposed:

• Instant global communication

• The ‘always-on’ expectation

• Public/private boundary collapsing

• Online dating replaces community-based courtship

• Swapped boredom/stillness for constant ‘entertainment’

• Algorithmic shaping of beliefs, identities and emotions

• Automation replacing labor

• The 24/7 global work cycles

• The decline of unions

• Largely sedentary lifestyles normalized

I’m not here to make to say what changes are good and what changes are bad.

But what I have learned in my own journey is that living a life with intention has lead to a happier, healthier more conscious life. The same can be said for the collective.

When we blindly adopt a new technology we are also accepting a new change in our society without consciously choosing that change.

So what can we do?

There is no easy answer but here are two thoughts I’ve been playing around with.

1. A New Movement

In every major technological revolution, you can point to organized movement that fought for positive change and human rights. Where is our movement?

exp. When the Industrial Revolution took place, it was eventually met with the Labour Movement. People saw the advancements that were shaping the new world and they wanted some say in the matter.

They no longer wanted to be exploited for their time and health in factories. They revolted against the companies and demanded changes: no child labour, safety regulations, wage protection, etc.

Is our time and health not being exploited again through this next revolution?

It’s just a little more hidden.

Instead of working fourteen hours a day in factories, we are scrolling on our phones for an avg. of seven hours a day for the big tech companies (44% of waking hours).

Back then they would barely pay you a liveable wage, now they don’t even pay you a cent for the data they are mining, collecting and selling.

Before they would exploit vulnerable children and mold them into a submissive workforce, now they target children to rewire their brain in order to turn them into lifelong users and consumers.

In the 1800’s prolonged exposure to chemicals and smoke would cause lung cancer, etc, now prolonged exposure to addictive platforms causes depression, anxiety, ADHD and loneliness.

To be clear, for the large part, these movements were not explicitly anti-technology. Yes, there are usually a small minority of people that say '“we need to get rid of ‘x’ technology” (ie. the Luddites) but those ideas have never been productive.

These movements were about humanity not completely handing over their future to technology that’s driven forward purely by companies.

Companies are not evil but they exist to make profits, not for the betterment of mankind.

These movement had the crazy idea that humans, not just corporations, should have a hand in building the tomorrow that we all have to live in.

I believe it’s time for another organized movement - not to halt progress but to help shape what that progress looks like. We should consciously choose the future, not blindly stumble there.

2. Increased Transparency/Regulation for Consumer Tech/AI

I’ll get some heat for this one.

The free markets, and just about everyone I know, hate regulation. And for good reason. It’s typically terrible for entrepreneurship and innovation.

But there are certain circumstances where the risks are so grave that the increased scrutiny becomes worth it.

Take the FDA for example, do they slow down innovation in the foods we consume and the drugs we put in our body? Yes, but the consequences of putting unregulated foods on our shelves or giving out drugs to millions without any oversight are just too dire.

We would end up in a situation where thousands get poisoned from something they bought at a grocery store or millions take a pill that causes disastrous, unknown side-effects.

There is precedent for setting up a regulatory body that oversees what a consumer puts into their physical body on a daily basis. But what about digital applications that we use every day? Does mentally consuming a certain technology for hours a day not make us sick? If it does, should the provider of that technology at least have to warn us of the risks?

Soon you’ll be able to have an idea on Thursday, built it over the weekend and have it in the hands of millions of consumers by Tuesday with no one asking the questions: “Is this harmful? What are the potential downstream effects of this?”

Unlike the FDA example I don’t think Government is the answer here, they move too slow and are already too far behind. We need to work towards a system that self-regulates. Where companies share the research/trials they have done with consumers and the advanced simulations they ran to see long-term side-effects.

We need to demand it with our dollars.

If not for the sake of our own mental health then for the sake of our children’s mental health.

All technology should serve/benefit us, not only in the short-term but in the long-term as well. If it’s genuinely going to help humanity, as a company, wouldn’t you want to share your research openly? And then the consumer can decided wether the benefits outweigh the risk and how often they want to interact with that platform.

The main argument I can see against any form of increased regulation or transparency in technology/AI is that it will slow down innovation and give competing nations like China the upper hand which becomes a national security risk.

Maybe.

But what would we think of China abolishing their NMPA (their version of the FDA)? Perhaps we’d be a little worried about their innovation cycles speeding up in medicine but at what cost?

They would be using their population as lab rats which would likely have deadly consequences down the line.

What if a drug was introduced that exploded in popularity due to its short term benefit but the long-term effect caused severe psychosis, depression, anxiety?

That would erode the very fabric of their society from the inside out.

The same logic applies to technology.

There’s an equally high risk of unfettered, unregulated advancements in tech/AI destroying our own country from within vs. a competing nation using it to destroy us.

Before blindly adopting a new technology or updating an app, we should demand to know what the suggested consumption guidelines are, the changes that were made, why and what long-term mental health risks they pose.

for.and.from.the.body. 🫂

Come join 100+ execs, founders and high-performers for our last session in this three-part Wellness series. Together we’ll be using neuroscience based techniques to wire your brain for success in 2026.

Due to some travel conflicts, I had to push it out so you can still register for free here.

Attendee feedback:

“I actually felt my whole body let go when we hit the deeper rounds. I came out feeling lighter”

“I feel so calm and focused.”

“That breathing session yesterday was amazing.”

Join us for our final visualization and breathwork session.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

If you’re feeling stressed over the holidays, take five minutes and throw this meditation/song in your eardrums from Mooji. It helps me remember.

Please support our partners:

Dreamfuel is offering a free, guided visualization/breath-work session to do with your entire team. These are customized to your team’s exact goals, right down to the revenue number you need to hit. Your mental performance coach will guide your organization through a shared experience where everyone can visualize and feel what it will be like to crush your 2026 targets together.

Due to bandwidth this will be done on a first come, first serve basis. Only available to Wake Up Call community. This will only take place in Jan/Feb, you can organize your free team session here.

latest.podcast.episode 🎙

In my latest interview, I sit down with one of my oldest friends.

I’ve known Drew Hall almost my entire life and his journey has not been easy, but it is an inspiring one. From catapulting to the top of the leaderboard in SaaS sales, to navigating addiction, to learning how to live with a Bipolar diagnosis: we get deep into it. Check out the full episode here.

Drew also just launched his own Substack called “It’s going to be alright, right?” - you can check it out here.

Alright, thanks for coming with me down that rabbit hole that is AI/rapid tech advancement.

Back to regular scheduled programming next week.

Have a wonderful holidays with your friends and family.

✌️

Scott Barker

“Don’t fight the mind. Just stop believing everything it says.” - Mooji

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #7 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. The unconscious trades we’re making when we adopt new tech into our lives

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

Perhaps I have too much time to think these days.

Too much time in solitude.

I’m alone in a modest, one-bedroom apartment in a small town in India.

My days are spent practicing yoga in the morning, meditating and then plopping myself down at my favorite coffee shop to think/write.

In modern life, this is a very rare thing to do and I realize how much of a gift it is to be able to completely unplug from the world.

The idea behind my writing is to help people ‘wake up before their wake up call’ on an individual level but lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about the wake-up call that humanity needs as a whole.

Sometimes I feel that I may be losing touch with reality but most of the time, I feel like I’m finally seeing things for how they really are.

With a little space you get the benefit of perspective.

Luckily for you, most of my thoughts remain as scribbles in my little cafe journal.

But some of these observations I feel called to share.

I’ve gone back and forth on sharing my thoughts on this topic because I don’t want to come across as the crazy, hypocritical guy yelling on his soap box.

This topic encompasses a world that gave me a lot, one that I built my entire career on and invested in heavily over the last four years.

That is the world of technology.

Let’s dive into it.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

First off, I want to say I am not anti-technology or anti-AI. And I’m certainly not anti-capitalism. It’s the best human organizational system we’ve come up with so far.

However I’m not convinced that this system is equipped for the technological shifts we’re about to go through.

And for all its benefits, we have never actually seen late-stage capitalism play out. It has certainly shown lots of positive early signals but we haven’t seen the end of this experiment yet.

Over the last 100 years, advancements in technology have:

• dramatically increased life expectancy

• eradicated many deadly diseases

• led to unprecedented decline in extreme poverty

• Increased food output by 50% per person

• allowed us to see the world around us

• expanded access to knowledge/opportunity

• ushered in the least violent era ever recorded

But it has come at a cost, we’ve also seen:

• a sharp increase in anxiety, depression and loneliness

• a decline in attention span and cognitive depth

• major disruptions in our sleep patterns

• real-life social interaction falling steadily

• our dopamine being hijacked for profit

• a rise in body image disorders

• a breakdown of meaning, presence and attention

• a loss of embodied life in favor of digital life

• an erosion of patience & emotional regulation

• misinformation, polarization and tribalism explode

None of these negative consequences are new to us.

You and I are the live guinea pigs in this experiment so we all feel it and see these things on a daily basis.

But it seems as if we’ve collectively put our head in the sand and I can’t figure out why?

I believe that the above are symptoms of a disease of sorts or a global addiction brought on by technology. And it’s become fairly clear to see that this is a progressive disease. Meaning this is not something that’s just going to go away on its own. A progressive disease, left unchecked/untreated, only gets worse over time.

Now I don’t believe this is some huge, global conspiracy to turn us into anxious, fearful digital slaves that are unable to do anything without the aid of technology. Even though that is one path that we could be heading down.

We simply traded our time and attention for efficiency, productivity and distraction again and again. And of course, when it becomes obvious that humanity is willing to make those trades then the market will create companies that are willing to facilitate that trade for us.

However, again and again, the trade ends up doing the opposite of what we hoped it would. We’ve now seen a few of these things play out and I think it’s important to at least understand the trades we are making. I’ll outline a few below as I see them.

A few of the recent trades we made:

1. Trade #1: Search engines

To gain more knowledge, we traded wisdom and memory.

The internet is a beautiful thing and as it exploded, we needed a quick way to organize, sort and search through the troves of knowledge. That’s when search engines entered the picture. It felt like magic. Anything you ever wanted to know was now just one question away.

In the early days, search results would be a little vague and you’d still have to scour through blogs, news articles, wikipedia pages, etc. to start to formulate your answer. You were very much a part of the process. It forced you to connect your own dots and make your own connections. Over time, with the introduction of ads, our search results started to get skewed and we only saw what the search engine wanted us to based on who was paying the most.

People and companies also started to understand how to optimize their content to reach the most people. They would predict our questions so that we no longer had to read multiple sources, everything we wanted was now on one page. Which was great. It sped up our knowledge acquisition but, at that point, we started trading depth for volume. We were no longer part of the process and so the information we ‘learned’ came fast and cheap.

Have you ever heard someone singing in a language that they don’t speak?

They may know the song/words but they don’t know the underlying language in order to fully do it justice. That became us. We ‘sort-of’ knew the answer/headline but we did not understand any of the underlying themes behind it.

And now, since we were inundated with knowledge that doesn’t connect in our brains, we had trouble sorting/storing all these fragmented facts/opinions. And why should we commit it to memory anyway? We’ve got a second memory, in the form of this search engine that can store everything for us. If we forget, we can just ask it again.

I’ll admit that I have probably googled “the difference between accept or except” close to fifty times throughout my adult life. Back when answers were harder to come by, you would only have to hear/read something once and you would take the time to comprehend it fully and store it in your memory.

Ask yourself: has your memory gotten better or worse since 2010?

And think of the last time you looked for an answer, do you think you could teach it to a room full of people without the aid of technology? Do you really understand it?

Evolution of the human mind has taken 300,000 years to adapt but through the over-reliance on just this one piece of technology, we are creating mental adaptations to our memory and our comprehension levels in a single lifetime.

2. Trade #2: Digital (Google) Maps

To save a little time, we traded spatial awareness and our ability to navigate our environment.

When Google Maps came out it was amazing. We all become the best navigators on planet earth and now we’d never have to be lost again.

We gladly gave it all of our attention while getting from point A to point B so we could get there more efficiently. No more scouring big maps or printing out pages on Map Quest. For a while, it lived up to its promise and we could get anywhere quickly/easily.

But as we became more and more reliant on it, we stopped giving our attention to our surroundings. We stopped noticing street names, distance/time travelled, landmarks, the spatial relationship between where one neighborhood begins and another ends, etc. Then one day, we woke up to find that our direction skills and ability to navigate our environment completely atrophied. Without a digital map, many of us could barely make it home.

It seems trivial but this is not a small thing. Humanity’s ability to navigate our surroundings/environment is one of the key elements that has allowed us to survive/thrive for thousands of years. It’s not crazy to predict that in one to two generations, this skill of navigation might be near extinct.

3. Trade #3: Social Media

To distract/entertain ourselves, we traded our time, the present moment, real connection, our attention span and our mental health.

This is the most insidious one. Remember when we thought we were trading a few silly photos for increased connection with friends/loved ones? We got that one wrong. There have been a handful of good things that have come from social media (mostly on the creator side not the user side) but I think it would be very hard to steel-man a case for social media being a net benefit to humanity.

A few years back I was sitting at a beautiful restaurant in Portugal overlooking the Mediterranean Sea as the sun was setting. And there was a group of four adults beside me with their six children. Each of the four adults were scrolling on their phones and the six kids all had tablets with big headphones in. At the time, It felt straight out of Black Mirror but now that’s normal.

What were they watching? Influencers showing off their beautiful travel videos? TV shows about funny, quirky families laughing around a dinner table? Even in the most beautiful moments, we now prefer someone else’s fake reality to our own.

Screen time (mostly spent on social media) has jumped from ~four hours in 2010 to seven to nine hours today. Last I checked, we are all still mortal so time will always be our most valuable commodity. If we’re lucky we get a very short, eighty to one hundred years on this planet so trading time for just about anything will always be a bad trade.

Yet somehow our brains have been hijacked into trading the miracle that is the present moment for funny cat videos or conspiracy theories. This trend is accelerating, not slowing down - how much more time is even possible to trade away?

4. Trade #4: ChatGPT (or other consumer AI products)

To make our lives easier, we’re trading our ability to think both critically & creatively and complete basic tasks.

This is humanity’s latest big trade and we’ve adopted it faster than any technology to date. We’re still seeing how it’s all going to play out. I can only observe how it’s beginning to impact me and the people around me. I’m sure there will be consequences that I cannot even fathom yet.

The reason I don’t use AI to help me with copywriting, or even proofread, this newsletter is because I know as soon as I start doing that then my own ability to write and proofread will begin to drop dramatically.

We’ve already traded our wisdom, our memory, our ability to navigate, our time, our attention span and our mental health. And we’re about to trade away the two most fundamental human skills: critical/creative thinking and basic task completion. What does that leave us with?

People say that technology frees up our time to focus on more human things, but I wonder what human things are going to be left?

It’s not a foregone conclusion but from the trends I can see, it will only free up our time to distract/entertain ourselves more. And what are we even distracting ourselves from?

From a world that has become too overwhelming and too overstimulating which is largely due to what? Technology.

5. Our Next Big Trade: AGI, Quantum Computing and Neurotechnology

We’re about to trade away our natural evolution for synthetic evolution.

These three technologies are no longer relegated to sci-fi.

They are all are coming and they are all coming faster than any of us thought. Up until this point, I think the trades we have made are reversible or we can mitigate the downside to some extent. This next trade we make will be irreversible.

These three technologies combined will unlock capabilities in humans that we can only dream of and inevitably, to reduce the friction, we’ll embed the tech right into our vision and then embedded it right into our brains.

If we can learn anything from our past trades, there will be negative consequences. This will put humanity on a completely new evolutionary path, forever intertwined with technology. Dependent on it for basic human function.

And is that what we want? Perhaps it is. But I don’t see any of us making a conscious choice. Are we all just too tired to care, have we become hopeless, are we now just passengers on our own planet?

We can’t lose hope. We have agency. Humans have fought for a brighter future since the dawn of time. Where is the debate? Where is the discourse?

We cannot simply sleep walk our way into becoming Gods.

—

I don’t think anything that I am writing here is overly new or novel.

And the hypocrisy of an ex-tech exec and VC who has built, sold and invested in technology for most of his career writing all of this, is not lost on me.

It goes without saying, that I can point to hundreds of incredible AI/tech/software companies that are improving the lives of workers/consumers. I think that’s what makes this conversation so difficult, it’s incredibly nuanced. For every positive advancement we make, that same advancement can be used negatively. And vice versa.

My whole point here is:

Right now all of our major societal changes are being driven by technology. A new technology is invented and it molds/shapes our society and behaviour, whereas I believe it should be the other way around.

Humanity should decide the world that we want to live in and build technology that brings us closer to that reality. Just because we can build a new technology does not mean we should.

It’s much easier said than done but I believe that figuring this out is one of the most crucial tasks of our time. If we don’t, we will all wake up in the not-so-distant future in a world that none of us recognize or want.

It’s an incredible difficult conversation with no easy solutions but we cannot shy away from hard, uncomfortable conversations right now. We don’t have the time to waste. The wheels of capitalism and the exponential nature of the technology we have released is not going to wait until we’re ready.

I will do my best to explore some potential solutions in my next edition.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

This is from the account @freedom.from.the.madness on Instagram.

—

Student: I need to do something with my life.

Teacher: Why do you feel that way?

S: Because as I am now feels insufficient.

T: Why do you feel insufficient?

S: Because there is comparison operating: who I am vs. who I think I should be.

T: Why is there a “should”?

S: Because society installed in me an image of what it means to be worthy: success, usefulness, recognition, becoming “someone”.

T: And why do you need that image? What happens if you let all that go?

S: Then the future dies. I feel worthless, static, no movement - not becoming anything.

T: And why is that a problem? What happens if ‘becoming’ ends? What happens when there is absolute stillness?

S: I will be nothing. Without action aimed at “somewhere”, the doer dies. And without the doer, the entire structure of my identity collapses.

T: And what happens when you are nothing, when there is no doer trying to control and act in life?

S: When I am nothing, I merge into everything; life is no longer an object that’s separate from me. I become life itself. What remains is what was here before the story started. Breathing without ambition. Seeing without distraction. Existence without a destination. Life without justification.

T: Hence, when you said, “I need to do something with my life,”, you were really whispering: “I am afraid to stand still and let the false fall away. I am afraid of the death that brings me back home - to wholeness.”

S: So the feeling “I need to do something with my life” is not a call to action. It is the moment that awareness forgets itself and mistakes a story of incompleteness for truth - the story of a separate somebody who must prove and earn the right to exist.

T: Exactly. You don’t need to do something with your life. Life is already being done as you. The exhaustion you feel is not from overactivity or inactivity. It comes from carrying the false burden of being a “doer”, a somebody who believes they must earn the right to exist.

You don’t need to become anything to be allowed to be here. Actually, that is the only way to truly be here. And here is peace. Here is freedom. Here is love. Here is beauty. Here is all that you seek when the seeker dies.

And the moment you turn away from this into becoming, the moment you separate yourself from existence, you become incomplete. You look to the future. You look there. And there is struggle. There is conflict. There is competition. There is effort. There is illusion. There is an endless thirst that no worldly thing can ever satisfy. Because our thirst is spiritual in nature, not material in nature.

There is nothing to be found outside. Yet everyone is drunk on something. For some, it is money. For others, fame or power. For some, family. For others, experience. No matter what we do with our lives, there is an emptiness still lurking beneath it all. Every worldly path eventually ends in pain. King, Queen or Billionaire - it makes no difference. And that is exactly what the pain is trying to teach us: to be still, and to turn our gaze within.

The one who seeks a future stands apart from life and calls the distance purpose.

The one who lets the future fall stands within life and calls this moment love. Where the one who strives becomes silent, the Way reveals itself without direction.

Where the hand releases the future, the present opens as eternity.

Where the doer ends, fear ends. Where fear ends, only what is remains.

Where the Doer falls into stillness, the Beloved stands uncovered as all things.

Seek no arrival.

Desire no becoming.

For the one who seeks is the veil, and the fall of the veil is love.

That is not something you become. That is what you already are.

latest.podcast.episode 🎙

In my latest interview I sat down with Chris Walker, CEO/Founder of Encoded.

In this conversation, Chris shares his journey of trading stress and burnout for freedom, clarity and purpose.

Special Offer: Our partners at Dreamfuel are doing something big to help teams kick off the New Year right. They are offering a free mental performance coaching for your entire team at your annual kick-off or RKO.

Due to coaching bandwidth this will be done on a first come, first serve basis. This will only take place in be available Dec/Jan, you can organize your free team session here.

Thanks for being here.

Like everyone else, I’m just trying to figure it out. I certainly don’t have the answers. The only thing I have right now is a little more space/time away from the madness that is modern life.

I welcome conflicting points of view, comments or challenges to anything I write. Healthy discourse/discussion is a dying art in our society and I think it’s incredibly important.

✌️

Scott Barker

“First we build tools, then the tools build us.”
— Marshall McLuhan

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #5 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How we are only ever taught how to do, never how to be

2. Why the world needs to remember an ancient technology: silence

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

I spent the last 20 days in an Ashram just outside of Rishikesh, India.

I’ve done a lot of searching for answers in my life. My search for meaning started long before I burnt out and walked away from everything.

That search brought me deep into the jungles of the Amazon and up into the mountains of the Himalayas.

I’ve plunged into the inner expanse of psychedelics, have read the teachings of as many spiritual leaders/philosophers as I can and I’ve tried just about every different wellness practice/modality, in an attempt to try to make sense of it all.

To try to make sense of what it is to be human, why we might be here, how we should spend our short lives.

And through all of that, I think the last couple of weeks that I’ve spent in India have brought me some of the most clarity and understanding. Not aided by anything beyond ancient wisdom and a lot of stillness.

The daily schedule was pretty rigorous with mandatory attendance in order to stay at the Ashram.

The morning bell would ring at 4:45am and beyond breaks for meals you are either in meditation, yoga, prayer, self reflection or philosophy class until 9:00pm. Depending on the day, you are doing some form of meditation for six to ten hours a day.

I spent six of the days in complete silence, with five of those not even looking or making eye contact with other people. You’re also following a strict sattvic diet (a plant based diet that emphasizes fresh, whole and natural foods) while you’re there and have almost no access to your phone/laptop or any other technology. I’ll admit that I did have to cheat twice for two meetings but my screen time probably topped out at two and a half hours over the twenty days.

It’s also worth noting that although this was a highly spiritual place it is not tied to any specific religion and it accepts all faiths/ideologies. During prayer you are free to pray to whomever/whatever you like.

You are learning from monks and teachers who are pulling from five thousand years of wisdom that has been passed down through sixty-eight generations. This particular Ashram followed The Himalayan Tradition of Yoga/Meditation.

I left with almost an entire journal full of learnings/ thoughts: some passed down from the teachers and others were ideas that came up in stillness.

And now I’m hunkered down by myself in an Airbnb in Tapovan, India for the next two weeks to try to make sense of all of the learnings.

I want to get a lot of these ideas out of my head while they are fresh so I may start publishing more than once of these a week while I’m feeling inspired.

Let’s get into it.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

I think it goes without saying that in my short twenty days, I did not even scratch the surface of understanding the Himalayan Tradition of Yoga/Meditation.

And I want to honor and acknowledge the fact that people spend their entire lives dedicated to understanding these teachings.

I’m not here to teach these traditions but rather share my experience with them, what it shone a light on for me and the principles/practices that I’ll be infusing into my own life.

The teachers did not necessarily describe it this way but through a few discussions with fellow seekers at the ashram, we decided that we were essentially getting an education on how to live.

Oddly enough, this is something that even the most educated among us were never really taught.

Note: there were people from all over the world staying there and the average age was ~forty-five with people as young as twenty-five and as old as ninety.

Many of us concluded that our entire education system in North America and Europe is built around teaching us how to ‘do’ and not one second is spent on how to ‘be’. And my god, we are good teachers. Look at how incredible we have all become at doing things. This focus on doing vs. being built the most productive society in human history.

Unfortunately no matter how hard we try, we can’t ‘do’ all the time, sometimes we need to just ‘be’. But we were never taught how to ‘be’ so we don’t know how. It’s very uncomfortable. We need ‘The Office’ or ‘Seinfeld’ on in the background while we sit with our laptops, refreshing Slack as we scroll through our phones making our next ‘To-Do list’ before we run off to do yet another workout class just so we can run away from any form of stillness/being whatsoever.

Do, distract, do, distract, do, distract, do, distract.

Yet you look at older societies (and traditions) in the East and they all have frameworks that teach you how to ‘be’ ie. what it means to be a virtuous human, how to be still, how to breathe, how to be with your own thoughts, how to be more aware.

Religion once partly filled this gap in the West but as Religion declined, nothing took its place. And with nothing to fill the vacuum, the majority turned to either conscious or unconscious escapism.

That escapism is making us sick.

So what do we do?

We need to revolt against the world of doing. I use the word ‘revolt’ intentionally because it takes a massive amount of intentional effort. All of society is set up to reward and keep you ‘doing’.

Now, I don’t believe there’s some deep conspiracy going on. We’ve just collectively decided to put productivity/efficiency above connection/wisdom for a long time. And I get it, we need to keep the gears of Capitalism going and for now, we don’t have a better system for organizing humans. But unfortunately, it’s come with some negative side effects. And in order to combat them, we must find small ways to revolt.

This revolt does not mean we have to take to the streets, boycott technology, halt progress, stop capitalism or quit our jobs. No, It’s a quiet revolution within yourself to make time to go inward as the outer world becomes harder and harder to detach from.

A revolt can be getting up an hour earlier to sit in silence with yourself, it can be going for a walk by yourself in the woods, it can be taking ten long inhales/exhales before every meeting, it can be locking your phone away for two hours a day or it can be a day where you try not to consume/build/create/do anything.

Attention is the currency right now, go inward and give it to yourself.

Relearn how to be, that’s the revolt (and the antidote from too much doing).

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

We lost touch with a really important technology for our soul:

Intentional silence.

I cannot believe it took me thirty-three years to simply shut-up: to stop talking, stop consuming, stop interacting with the outer world even just for six short days.

The teachers at the Ashram would talk about using silence as a way of removing ‘imprints’ we get from the environment around us.

Everything we hear, read, see, say is leaving an imprint in our minds and we’re bombarded by more imprints than ever. These imprints interrupt our natural/higher intelligence from coming through, hijack our attention and steal our focus.

Many of us go about our lives believing we have no control over our thoughts as we bounce from one imprint to another. Living that way, our thoughts are being decided for us by what we consume. In silence, this all becomes very clear.

With no outside stimulus, you can identify the monkey mind (lower mind, mindless chatter, unnecessary worrying, imprints that send you down a useless path) much easier and can consciously choose to shift to more productive thoughts.

And since you don’t have the entire expanse of human knowledge at your fingertips (silence includes texting or consuming anything so no phones) you sit with your questions longer, you can wrestle with a problem for hours and that allows you to actually see it through to some sort of conclusion.

It may sound insane but by about day three of silence, it felt like I was tapping into some higher form of intelligence within myself. I would sit with something long enough and an answer would eventually appear. Sometimes in the form of a thread to pull, sometimes as a complete thought.

With all the distraction of the modern world, I think we’ve lost this natural gift but it’s always right there for all of us if we give ourselves space. Just a little uncomfortable space before we reach for our phones to give us the nice, quick AI summary. There are some questions can’t be answered in five neat bullet points.

In silence, you also begin to realize how much energy is wasted on planning our interactions with others, thinking about what we’re going to say, thinking about why we said ‘that’ instead of ‘this’, how we’re going to come across, how people will perceive us. You get all of that energy back to wrestle with the bigger questions for a while.

Silence will play a bigger role in my life going forward.

I’ll be doing a full ten day Vipassana sometime in the new year and integrating a day/week of complete silence. One day every week just for me to go inwards.

Of course, none of this is new. It’s been in humanity’s tool belt since the dawn of time but we’ve lost it somewhere along the way. I recently learned that the author, Yuval Noah Harari, spends one to two months a year in silence and credits that practice for his ability to write Sapiens and Homo Deus.

Do some experimenting with silence on your own, this is a powerful tool that can bring more peace, creativity and clarity into your life. It’s simple, free and available to all of us at any time.

A few things to note:

• It’s not just about ‘not talking’, it’s about removing the intention to speak and consume.

• Longer periods can be quite challenging for a lot of people so make sure you do your own research and set up an environment that’s conducive to it.

• I would strongly recommend having some form of meditation practice in place before going deep into this.

After my brain finally settled down, silence felt like coming back to my childhood home.

Our partners at Dreamfuel are doing something BIG to help teams dial in for the New Year.

They are offering to facilitate a free, guided visualization/breathwork session for your entire team. These are customized to your team’s exact goals, right down to the revenue number you need to hit. Your mental performance coach will guide your organization through a shared experience where everyone can visualize/feel what it will be like when you crush your 2026 targets together.

Due to bandwidth this will be done on a first come, first serve basis. This will only take place in Dec/Jan, you can organize your free team session here.

Thanks for rocking with me until the end.

I hope all my U.S. friends had a nice Thanksgiving with friends/family.

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you on Wed. for the next session in our Wellness Series. If you haven’t registered yet, you can snag your spot here.

We’re bringing back the legend, Alex Easby, to lead it and he’s been cooking up a really cool, new visualization. I’m very excited about this one.

Have a beautiful start to your week, appreciate you ✌️

Scott Barker

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”- Krishnamurti

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #5 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. A story about the biggest lie I told myself and my loved ones

2. How to identify and break pattern loops

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

I wrote the bulk of this from Pokhara, Nepal and I’m sending it out from Rishikesh, India.

It’s been a bit of an adjustment to go from the rigorously scheduled and physically intense days of trekking to a lot of down time (it’s been pouring rain here so not much exploring). There is certainly a beauty in purely focusing on survival, all of your human problems seem to melt away on the mountain.

But it’s time for the next leg of my journey to India. I know my problems will follow me there but with a little less attachment these days.

I flew into New Delhi and then took a long car ride to Rishikesh where I’m hunkering down in an Ashram for a few weeks. I put my physical/mental spirit to the test on the last leg and now it’s time to do some soul work.

My days will be spent largely in silence, meditating, practicing yoga, kirtan chanting and connecting to my surroundings/others.

In theory, it all sounds pretty beautiful but this level of stillness always comes with its challenges. It’s not that long ago that my days were filled with back to back investor meetings, founders calls, hosting dinners, jumping on airplanes and five million different micro decisions. My brain is still hard-wired for action and busyness.

Letting go of that completely will be tough.

I’ve been reading ‘The Tibetan Book of The Living and Dying’ and it talks a lot about Samsara. Samsara means “wandering” or “flowing on.” It’s the constant motion of life and death, driven by karma and suffering.

It explains that the greatest tragedy of samsara is not that we suffer, but that we suffer meaninglessly—because we don’t understand the true nature of mind.

We chase pleasure, status, and control—mistaking fleeting experiences for lasting happiness. In doing so, we forget our true nature, the vast, unchanging awareness beneath all thoughts and sensations. That forgetting—called avidyā or ignorance—is the engine that keeps samsara turning.

In this edition, I’ll share some insight into my own Samsara - the self-created suffering loops that I was caught in chasing achievement and wealth.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

I’ve come to learn that my story is not all that unique.

Most high-performers experience a similar version of self-inflicted suffering, the vices/stories/habits/coping mechanisms look different but many of the core loops and lies we tell ourselves look quite similar.

Here’s the short, all-too-real, version of what a loop can look like for a high-performer:

We grow up keenly aware of the expectations that others place on us, soon these turn into our own expectations.

If you’re cut a certain way, very quickly your own expectations for life dwarf what anybody else could have placed on you.

You then set out to build a life based around these lofty expectations.

But right from the start, there is a flaw in the system.

These needs/wants are not rooted in truth/love.

We’re too young to understand why we want the things we want and that the ideas placed in our head from those around us are usually based in fear ie. your family desperately wants you to be ‘successful’ and ‘wealthy’ because they think those things will bring you safety.

You are already not living in your truth.

But you don’t know that and this way of living works for quite a while. It’s fun to see your efforts bend/mold reality to fit the future you imagined for yourself.

At this point, most of us are still in survival mode, so being able to buy the food we want to eat, the clothes we want to wear, live in the nice apartment, buy the car we want - all this feels really good.

Ah-ha this is the point of this whole grand adventure. I just have to play this game, work really hard and then I get the things that I want. And who doesn’t want to get the things that they want?

You’ve cracked the code, this is easy.

A few years pass though and the things you want grow. These new things either cost a lot of money or take a tremendous amount of energy to create.

Thankfully you’ve figured out this game so you know you just need to work harder so you increase your energy output towards the goal/expectations so you can get the new, bigger things.

Although this game you’re playing is not rooted in truth, by now it feels more real than anything you’ve ever done before.

Unfortunately the increased energy output leaves you feeling exhausted.

But that’s ok, this is just an intense period.

In this state of exhaustion, the questions start to creep in.

“What am I doing all of this for? How did this all happen? What is the point of all this?”

But right on cue, comes the next big illusion of ‘momentum’.

We’re all taught that ‘speed is the currency of business’ and there’s always someone ready to take our spot. We should be grateful for the opportunities we are given. We can’t afford to take breaks, we can’t afford to rest, we must keep this going or we’ll lose everything we worked so hard for.

What about all of those sacrifices we’ve made already? And all those people counting on us?

Everything will vanish if we slow down.

And even if we could, we now have this big, fancy life filled with all these things & those things come with bills and mortgages.

Now the fear of loss really starts to kick in.

Luckily we know the solution that’s always been there for us: work harder.

We’ve now become a little more self-aware though and we realize that we can’t expend this much energy forever. We feel it now, it takes a toll.

But it’ll be ok - this is just an intense period.

But we tell ourselves that we’re still young enough so we need to capitalize on the opportunities in front of us. Now is the time to acquire as many resources as we can so we can ‘escape velocity’ & then maybe once we’re set up financially, we’ll still have some time for those other dreams that now feel like a distant memory.

The time is now so we add more to the plate.

But now it’s suddenly unnatural, you’ve found your edge/limit and it starts to really wear you down.

You need a new edge, a new answer.

So you throw the same work ethic at the problem: you read all the books, you dial in your workout regimen, perfect your diet, start doing yoga, go to therapy, start meditating, get a coach and up your caffeine intake.

And it works…for a few years.

Many of these are great habits you’ve acquired but your relationship to them is transactional. You’re not actually present for any of them, you’re ‘using them’ to increase your output. You’re always seeing past them to the reward you get at the end.

You’ve also just added a ton more to your plate and you feel guilty if you miss even a single one of these practices in a day. Now you’ve put even more pressure on yourself to perform.

Work comes first, your ‘productive habits’ come second and friends/family/everything else comes after (if you have the energy).

But it’ll be ok, this is just an intense period.

Your balance is off again and you can barely focus on anything anymore, you’re just going through the motions.

How are these other successful people all doing it?

Hmm you’ve heard about Adderall and other ADHD medication for years which seems to give people a lot of energy.

All the people you know in Finance working 80+ hours a week eat it like candy so it can’t be that bad? And at this point, you can’t focus anyway so maybe you do have ADHD?

That’s gotta be the solution.

So you ask your friends for some and ‘BAM’: a silver bullet.

You can work uninterrupted for ten or twelve hours straight and it seems to stave off some of the depressive thoughts you’ve been having recently.

Oh and now you don’t need as many of those good habits you’ve fostered over the years since you have more energy. They take too much time away from work anyway…

The only small problem is your little magic pills don’t let you sleep much. It’s rare that you get more than four hours sleep. But we’ll deal with that later, it’s not like things will be this intense forever.

You can see the light at the end of the tunnel now, you can see the life you’ve always dreamed of. You just have to hit this last big goal and then you’ll get your priorities straight. Your family, friends and health just need to hold on a little longer.

You’re tired all the time, your nervous system is a wreck and now every single day feels like the most important day of your life.

Through that lens, any sacrifice is worth it.

But all those sacrifices have left you feeling like you don’t really have a handle on the rest of your life.

Yet you’re really good at your work so you get even more myopically focused on your big goal. That’s the only lane that feels comfortable now.

Your work day is filled with important decisions, bigs wins and tough losses that make you feel alive. So by the time you get home, you don’t know what to do with yourself.

Normal life starts feeling dull.

The things you used to enjoy to relax don’t cut it anymore.

Alcohol does though.

It feels like it brings a little balance back to your nervous system and numbs some of the weight/expectations you’ve placed on yourself.

After three glasses of whiskey, the three flights you have to catch next week seem a little more manageable. And as a bonus, it gives you a little more energy to talk with your partner at home who you’ve been neglecting.

You also miss the big dopamine hits you get at work so something needs to fill that void at home as well? You always liked cards, a little gambling can’t hurt. The ups and downs feel familiar.

You’ve now swapped all your good habits for bad ones but of course this is temporary and you need them to cope.

But it’ll be ok, this is just an intense period.

Somehow the train keeps rolling and your output remains high. You feel like a shell of your old self but look at all the accolades coming your way?

The friends and family you’ve been ignoring, keep telling you that ‘you’re killing it’ and you can feel their increased respect/admiration. That feels good.

On one of your long flights home, frazzled/exhausted/anxious, one of these friends suggests Xanax to calm your nerves and help you sleep.

You have the best sleep you’ve had in five years on that airplane so of course that joins the rotation.

Adderall to perform. Alcohol to escape. Xanax to sleep.

Perform. Escape. Sleep.

That’s your whole life now.

You’re a well-oiled, capitalist machine.

You repeat this day after day, month after month.

Your relationships fall apart, all the hobbies that brought you joy are gone, any down time you have is filled with escape/distraction because you can’t be alone with your own thoughts.

You barely recognize yourself in the mirror.

But it’ll be ok - this is just an intense period.

Just hold on a little longer.

And then the day finally comes, the big insane goal that will change your life is hit. You must be ecstatic, you did it! It’ll all be worth it.

You celebrate with your team, yet inside you feel nothing.

You’re just as tired, anxious, fearful, scared and numb as you were yesterday. You feel lost and your brain immediately looks past this milestone and decides we need a new, bigger goal.

You’ve successfully rewired your brain to only crave one thing: achievement.

Because if you’re not achieving, who are you?

Who am I?

Whose life is this?

These questions you tried so hard to ignore come flooding in and you can barely breathe.You’re used to panic attacks by now but this one is different.

It’s enough to kick you straight off the mountain top you just climbed.

You reach out to grab for anything but it’s as if you are a child, every feeling, every coping mechanism, even your sense of identity was sold in pursuit of this goal.

And there was nothing there the whole time.

But it’ll be ok, this is just an intense period.

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for.and.from.the.body. 🫂

From the rearview mirror, the loops we get caught in can look so obvious. It’s like an insane person hijacked our lives and became completely oblivious to the patterns that kept repeating again and again.

But from experience, I know it’s very difficult to identify these patterns when we’re in it. I find that our brains can be tricksters but our body/nervous system rarely lie.

I’m certainly not a therapist or a counselor but here are some ideas, thoughts and questions that I wish I had asked myself earlier.

1. Start with Emotion, Not Rational Analysis

Don’t look for patterns in logic, look for patterns in emotion.

Questions to ask:

What situations consistently trigger strong emotional reactions (shame, anger, anxiety, abandonment)?

Who or what type of person repeatedly activates those feelings?

What role do you end up playing in those moments (rescuer, victim, controller, avoider, etc.)?

Patterns usually follow emotions, not pure circumstance.

2. Follow the Thread

Once you identify a recurring pattern, trace it back.

Questions to ask:

What story plays in your mind right before or after the emotion? (“I’m not enough,” “They’ll leave,” “I have to fix it.”)

When’s the earliest memory you can find that carries that same emotional tone?

What need was unmet in that early memory?

Our loops often form when a childhood coping strategy becomes a lifelong reflex.

3. Observe the Reward

Every repeated pattern exists because it gives us something — even if it hurts.

Questions to ask:

What do I secretly get from this loop? (Control? Familiarity? The right to feel wronged?)

What would I have to face or give up if I stopped repeating it?

Identifying the payoff allows you to get honest with your psyche.

4. Listen to the Body

Your unconscious lives in your nervous system. .

Notice in your body:

When tension, constriction, or restlessness arises.

How your breath changes when a loop is triggered.

Where in your body you feel “small,” “invisible,” or “on guard.”

If you check-in daily with your body and can learn to sense what a negative loop feels like as it starts then it won’t hijack your behavior.

5. Compassion before Judgment

You can’t heal what you ignore or shame. Each pattern/loop is an old belief system or coping mechanism that’s trying to help.

Question to ask:

“What is this part of me trying to protect me from?”

You’re not going to war with yourself, you’re trying to understand. Show up as you would to a friend instead of yourself.

6. Look for Healthy Mirrors

This work is very difficult and it’s easy to delude ourselves. Therapists, coaches, partners, and friends can all help us to reflect back things we cannot see.

Questions to ask your mirrors:

“What are my blind spots?”

“If you were me, what would you do less of/more of? And why?”

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

I listened to this talk/song many times on my Everest Trek and I think you’ll enjoy it. I’d recommend giving it a listen but it’s a good read as well.

I, I think if I could get you to do one thing

I would say that when you get to the point that you

Really feel, highly motivated, to, just, towards keeping your virtue

Then you’ll, you’ll discover quite quickly how extraordinary a life was meant to be

Could be

And it’s, it’s just we get so messy, it’s not that we are doing lots of wrong things

Our mind is so messy

We don’t keep it simple

And we end up making the life that we are living, so in—ordinarily complicated

Completely unnecessarily, and it’s such a shame to end up feeling, in a real muddle

When actually, you ought to be having the time of your lives

It doesn’t actually take very much to make the deepest part of us incredibly happy

You know?

Just to be here, just to appreciate

Appreciate being here

To feel that you’re alive

To be in touch with your heart

That’s it

That’s it

It takes mindfulness to come to a human life

And then above that, it takes mindfulness and virtue

To come to a fortunate human life

The chance to be part of this happens briefly

The invitation is not to show how inventive and imaginative you are

But how much you can notice what you’re already part of

And appreciate it and share it

And care about those that are around who count for their welfare

While you are looking out for your own, that’s it

And then you’ll get to the end of it, having had an awesome time

Knowing, that, that is something you’d recommend to others

Ah

You all know

You already know this place inside, where it’s alright

You all know that when you let the ego go, it’s not this black hole that you jump into

You all know it

Why can’t we do it?

And yet the world is creaking under the strain of this in—ordinarily complicated

Mass of humanity and actually you know, it’s really simple

When you came here

You came here with a sense of awe and wonder, dying to just see what it’s about

You know, it’s like, what would it be like?

To be down there?

To be part of it?

And you came here with a sense of wonder

And somehow the wonder of it wasn’t enough

And we stopped wondering and started to wonder about ourselves

And in your wondering about yourself

You forgot what you came here for, what you came to be a part of

latest.podcast.interview.

My latest interview is with Andy Johns.

Andy had an incredibly successful career in tech. He was an early employee at Facebook, Twitter and Quora before becoming the President at Wealthfront. After that he helped build Unusual Ventures as a Founding Partner.

But along the way he struggled for years, in this episode he opens up about his struggles and how it led him to the spiritual path that he’s on today. It’s a very real, very raw episode that covers some intense topics that aren’t often discussed openly. Andy is a personal inspiration and it was an honor to host this conversation.

You can also catch up on episodes with Justin Welsch, Kyle Lacy, Tessa Whittaker and Nirosha Methananda - you can binge them all here.

That’s all from me.

A big thank you to all of those you joined the first session of our Wellness Series last week, I’m grateful for all the incredible feedback. Any/all feedback is always welcome and I plan to make each one of these better than the last.

You can snag your spot for the next one here.

Have a beautiful rest of your week, appreciate you.

Scott Barker

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”- Rainer Maria Rilke.

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #4 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. The lessons I re-discovered while hiking to Everest Base Camp

2. The science behind breath-work and guided visualization

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

I’m back from my sixteen day trek to Everest Base Camp/Chola Pass/Gokyo Lake, currently writing from a beautiful lakeside city in Nepal called Pokhara.

Where to start.

Physically it was one of the more challenging experiences that I’ve had in my life. The only other time I can remember pushing my body that hard was training two-a-days for the BC Summer Games many, many years ago.

We started in Thamel, Kathmandu to get all of our supplies. Since I’ve been travelling for a while, I don’t have any of my hiking gear with me. Luckily I had a friend fly over from Vancouver who was able to bring my boots, some hiking pants and a few sweaters.

Beyond those items, we all had to rent/buy our supplies (camelbacks, poles, cramp-ons, gloves, layers, etc) for the mountain. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of stores catering to the trekkers that come through here so there’s many options for reasonable prices.

Everything was set up through Everest Trekking Routes who I highly recommend. They picked us up from the airport and took care of all of the details from start to finish.

We then all piled into a van at 8pm for a long overnight, windy and bumpy journey to Ramechhap airport. In Nepal, trucks aren’t allowed on the streets during the day so the streets are packed at night with huge vehicles ripping past you at insane speeds…with about two inches of clearance. You won’t be getting any sleep.

After more than a few close shaves, we arrived in the early morning. The airlines don’t exactly run like we might be used to so after five more hours of waiting, we all piled into a small 16 seater airplane to take the short 25 minute flight to Lukla.

Lukla Airport has the esteemed title of ‘the most dangerous airport in the world’ due to its extremely short, sloped runway, high altitude, unpredictable weather, and lack of advanced navigation systems.

I can tell you that it did not disappoint. Even when you haven’t slept a wink in twenty four hours, you’ll be wide awake when you start to descend and it looks like you are about to crash into the side of a mountain.

Now all hopped up on fear-induced adrenaline, the real journey begins.

After a short meeting with our guide/porters and a quick breakfast in Lukla it was time to drag our sleepy selves onto the trail. This first day is a bit of a blur mixed with exhaustion and excitement. We eventually made it to our first tea house after a three/four hour hike.

Along the trail, there are small towns every few hours where you sleep and eat. Each town will have a series of ‘tea-houses’ which are basically very simple bed & breakfast style houses run by families. Usually you’ll get a 8x10 foot room with two single beds and a communal bathroom - sometimes just a hole in the ground. Each one has a main dining hall where they serve you dinner (lots and lots of Dhal Bat) and breakfast (Chapati and eggs became my go-to).

In the middle of the room, there’s a fireplace with a chimney which they light each night before dinner. The only issue is that there is very little wood available once you get to a certain altitude so what do they use instead?

Dried Yak poo.

Yes, it sounds a little gross but also quite innovative. So I now simultaneously hate the smell of Yak feces with a passion and also associate it with much needed warmth, so it’s a strange love/hate relationship. The set up is all very basic but trust me, after 6-7 hours of trekking (sometimes in the freezing cold), this feels like the absolute height of luxury.

You’re also reminded daily that every piece of plywood that makes up your wall, every little mirror hanging there just to serve your vanity, every utensil you use, each western-style toilet that you’re accustomed to, is brought up not by a helicopter, not by a crane, not by a backroad for trucks, but by actual human beings…

As you are struggling to breathe, trying not to fall off the side of a cliff and lugging your little 10kg backpack up a hill, you are likely to get passed by a sherpa/porter with three pieces of plywood on his back, two boxes of supplies and a backpack. I’ve never witnessed physical feats like I have over the last two weeks. The mental and physical strength is beyond comprehension. Our guide told us that sometimes they will carry loads of up to 150kg on their backs (300+ lbs) through some of the harshest terrain on planet earth.

It’s a tough thing to come to terms with. On one hand, they can make good money, support their family and many seem very happy. But on the other side, these incredible humans are risking their lives daily to carry supplies and new infrastructure up the Himalayas to serve the needs of tourists like me. I’m still wrestling with this and probably will for quite awhile.

The first few days were quite manageable. You’re hiking for most of your day which is tiring but the uphill is fairly gradual and the air around you still has a good amount of beautiful oxygen in it.

After you hit roughly day five or ~4000m of elevation things start to get real. After leaving a small, beautiful town called Dingboche, all of a sudden your legs feel a little more heavy and you can’t seem to catch your breath anymore. You try to do all the breathing techniques that you’ve learned: long, slow, belly breaths, in and out through the nose, but it doesn’t stop the feeling of breathlessness. You’ll have to get used to this state quickly and learn not to panic. This will be your new normal for the next few days as you ascend further and further.

The trail also begins to weed out and you start to see less and less humans/yaks/horses along the less beaten path. But as it gets more and more difficult, luckily the beauty around you grows at roughly the same rate. You’re now almost eye level with some of the most breath-taking mountain ranges that you’ve ever seen.

And anytime you feel like you need to stop or your mind is being unkind to you for whatever reason, all you have to do is look around.

Look around at the magnificence that is all around you, that is the natural world, that is this beautiful, humbling, unforgiving (and life-giving) climate that is the remnants of a very ancient ocean. Fifty or sixty million years ago this was an ocean floor. The Indian Plate and the Eurasian plate collided to form the Himalayan Mountain ranges and the Tibetan Plateau and this collision is still happening today.

These mountains are still growing every year in front of our eyes. All of this combines to make your little human problems seem quite insignificant…

Yet the human problems persist, particularly the lack of oxygen. Once you hit Gorakshep at 5200M in elevation, your last stop before Everest Base Camp, you start to notice that many people you pass are not doing well. And when you’re huddled into a small dining hall at night with people from all over the world, you hear the sounds of the sick everywhere: coughing, wheezing, panicked conversations.

What you don’t read about is how many people don’t make it. I’m not talking about death (although that does happen more often than you think) but the number of people that have to get rescued either by horse or helicopter. Once you’re really up there, there is a steady stream of helicopters in the morning evacuating people out who have severe altitude sickness. Thanks to modern ways of transportation and modern medicine most of them recover, but it’s a stark reminder of the fragility of human life.

Altitude sickness does not care if you’re a guide who has been doing this for fifteen years, a porter who basically lives up there or a tourist who runs marathons. It seems to happen at random and can afflict anyone.

You control your diet, your supplies, your sleep, your breath and your mind - that’s it.

We eventually made it to Everest Base Camp which was admittedly underwhelming and for some strange reason, we decided to push it further & go higher through Chola Pass and Gokyo Lake.

It turned into a couple more very intense days but worth it in every way. Sitting on the top of Chola Pass is a feeling that I will never forget.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll revisit my journey and add more color to it in future editions but one of the most impactful parts of the whole experience was simply having extended time to think. For many hours on end, it’s just you putting one foot in front of the other and your mind going wherever it wants to.

I can’t remember having this much time to think since I was a child and it led to some long journal entries.

In this edition, I’ll share 16 reflections I had along the way.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

Each reflection could be its own section and there’s a lot of nuance/secondary thought that comes with each one of them. I will likely go deeper on each in future editions but for now I’m called to just share the bullet points of each.

And forgive me for more than a few cliches, somehow the truth of cliches hit a little harder in the mountains.

1. We have success backwards in the West.

I’ve met many successful people on my travels, none of them worried about accumulating ‘things’. Once they had food, shelter and companionship - they gave the rest away to help others.

In the West we only share our wealth when our wealth cup is overflowing, then maybe we’ll give some of the spillage away. In this part of the world you look to give back as soon as you meet your basic survival needs, giving a steady feeling of fulfillment which seems to stave off the depression, anxiety and fear. All while working harder than any of us could ever even imagine.

2. A beginner’s mind.

Whether it’s building a company, hitting your number, raising funds, self development or climbing a mountain, the mantra “just getting started” still proves to be a great way to approach life.

3. Avoid cliffs.

You will make many mistakes in your life, that’s ok. But the mountains show you there are certain mistakes that cannot be undone (wrong step on a cliff, getting your gear wet, etc). Reflect on your ‘life or business cliffs’ and avoid them at all costs.

4. We are not solitary creatures.

Originally I imagined that most of my adventure of ‘finding peace’ would be spent alone. Time to reflect or meditate alone is important but experiences are meant to be shared. Incredibly grateful for my two childhood friends and girlfriend joining me on this leg. It would have felt hollow without them.

5. When pushing your body to the extreme you really learn that food is fuel.

What you decide to put into your body will directly impact your mind/body for the next twelve hours. When we’re moving fast, it can be easy to choose convenience but we do pay the price whether we consciously notice or not.

6. Burnout seems to be a western or affluent affliction.

It’s undoubtedly very real. I experienced it. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people actively experiencing it. But there are guides and porters here that are working potentially the most grueling job on planet earth for 20 years and when asked they’ll say ‘I love to work, I get to help my family’. They don’t have the luxury of thinking about themselves.

7. Love and support can bend fate.

At 5400m elevation one of my friends got quite sick and we thought we’d have to head back. Our incredible guide, Sukra, advised us to check up on him every two hours throughout the night. He said “we need to make sure he’s ok but more importantly he needs to feel that’s he’s not alone and he has love/support around him - that’s how he’ll get better.” The next day he felt good enough to continue and expressed a ton of gratitude for everyone checking in on him.

8. You can only control your breath and your mind.

You’ll hit a point where the altitude and terrain become the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve trained, how many times you’ve done treks like this, how old you are - it will come down to you vs you. Your control over your next breath and your control over your mind are the only things that will keep you going.

9. Language matters.

On day one, our guide told us that as long as we were on the mountain we were family. Anytime things got tough he would yell “happy, strong family” and after a while we all started doing the same. Even when you don’t feel happy or strong, the words start to seep into your psyche and change your mood. Some might call it ‘toxic positivity’ but there’s nothing toxic about it when you’re on the side of a mountain.

10. Thought robbers.

As mentioned, I’m not sure if I’ve had as much time to just walk/think since I was a kid. You can start to identify ‘thought robbers’ - consistent thought patterns (usually negative) that pop up and can easily start to consume you + rob you of the present moment. These happen in our day-to-day all the time but they are much harder to notice. Spend time to identify them.

11. The destination is unimportant.

I mean this is maybe the biggest cliche there is but it doesn’t make it less true. Like I said above, Everest Base Camp was actually quite underwhelming but the journey? Incredible.

That goal you really want to hit? It won’t feel like you think it will so I hope you find a way to enjoy the process of getting there.

12. Starting is the hardest part.

Without fail, getting up early in the freezing cold and the first twenty minutes of trekking were the hardest part. Every muscle hurts, you’re fighting against your brain and your lungs don’t work the way they are supposed to. On the other side of starting is where all the juicy goodness is though. Just start, the rest takes care of itself.

13. Music is magic.

The universal language of life. When you want to stop or feel terrible, put on your favourite song and dance around. It works every time even at 5400m elevation.

14. Full accountability and self reliance.

I’m not sure there’s a better marker for success than taking full accountability for yourself and your actions. Nobody is checking your bag to make sure you have your cramp-ons for the snow, that you brought enough water, or that you wore enough layers. It’s on you, it’s always on you.

15. The more you notice, the more present you become.

This one goes hand in hand with ‘thought robbers’. When you find yourself in a thought loop, the quickest way out is to try to notice as much of your surroundings as possible. The faster you increase your awareness, the faster you become present again.

16. People are inherently good.

It was inspiring to see people from all over the globe come together to help each other when times got tough. Our beautiful guide, Sukra, stayed up all night with a porter who had very severe altitude sickness - hugging him, calming him down, getting him more blankets - until the helicopter could pick him up in the morning.

Regardless of what the news says, kindness is everywhere and it’s usually the default setting.

Please take a moment to support our partners Optimizing.ai and Dreamfuel.

I’ve been incredibly intentional with who I partner with on this next chapter of my life. I believe that both of these companies exist to make the world a better place.

Optimizing.ai gives you real-time emotional intelligence for digital experiences - powered by AI, captured by webcam. You can now stop guessing what your users actually feel. Now accepting a limited amount of beta customers.

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for.and.from.the.body. 🫂

What was once thought of as ‘woo-woo’ or just ancient practices is now grounded in deep physiology and neuroscience research.

1. The Science of Breathwork

Your body’s automatic processes (stress response, heart rate, digestion, etc.) are controlled by the Autonomic Nervous System which is made up of the Sympathetic Nervous System (fight or flight) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (rest and digest). Breath is one of the few levers we have to influence the Autonomic Nervous System.

Slow, deep breathing will stimulate the vagus nerve and activates the PNS. This can help lower heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol. Slow breathing also reduces activity in the amygdala - the brain’s fear center.

Fast, intense breathing can temporarily activate the SNS which leads to a cathartic release, followed by emotional regulation.

The insular cortex, which processes interoceptive signals, becomes more active during mindful breathing. Over time, this can improve emotional intelligence: you become more aware of what’s happening within you before it comes out of you unconsciously.

2. The Science of Guided Visualization

The brain doesn’t fully distinguish between real and vividly imagined experiences. When you visualize something in detail, the same neural circuits activate as if you were actually doing it.

Repeated visualization builds neural pathways that prime the body for real-world performance or emotional outcomes - a principle that elite athletes, musicians and trauma recovery patients know very well.

Breathwork shifts your state (physiology) and visualization rewires your story (neural patterns). Together, they create measurable changes in stress hormones, brainwave patterns, immune function and behavior.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

I stumbled across this letter from 1958 that Hunter S. Thompson wrote at the age of 22 when his friend asked him for some life advice. It’s worth a read and then a re-read:

April 22, 1958

57 Perry Street

New York City

Dear Hume,

You ask advice: ah, what a very human and very dangerous thing to do! For to give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal— to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

I am not a fool, but I respect your sincerity in asking my advice. I ask you though, in listening to what I say, to remember that all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine. If I were to attempt to give you specific advice, it would be too much like the blind leading the blind.

“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles … ”

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect— between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

But why not float if you have no goal? That is another question. It is unquestionably better to enjoy the floating than to swim in uncertainty. So how does a man find a goal? Not a castle in the stars, but a real and tangible thing. How can a man be sure he’s not after the “big rock candy mountain,” the enticing sugar-candy goal that has little taste and no substance?

The answer— and, in a sense, the tragedy of life— is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.) There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

I’m going to steer clear of the word “existentialism,” but you might keep it in mind as a key of sorts. You might also try something called Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, and another little thing called Existentialism: From Dostoyevsky to Sartre. These are merely suggestions. If you’re genuinely satisfied with what you are and what you’re doing, then give those books a wide berth. (Let sleeping dogs lie.) But back to the answer. As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors— but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires— including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life— the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

Let’s assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let’s assume that you can’t see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN— and here is the essence of all I’ve said— you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

Naturally, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ve lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn’t any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”

And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know— is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

If I don’t call this to a halt, I’m going to find myself writing a book. I hope it’s not as confusing as it looks at first glance. Keep in mind, of course, that this is MY WAY of looking at things. I happen to think that it’s pretty generally applicable, but you may not. Each of us has to create our own credo— this merely happens to be mine.

If any part of it doesn’t seem to make sense, by all means call it to my attention. I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that— no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.

And that’s it for now. Until I hear from you again, I remain,

your friend,

Hunter

latest.podcast.interview. 🎙

I recorded this solo episode from the base of Ama Dablam, halfway through my trek. I reflect on the meaning of ‘success’, share lessons from local entrepreneurs and give my thoughts on legacy/giving back.

You can also catch up on episodes with Justin Welsh, Kyle Lacy, Tessa Whittaker and Nirosha Methananda - binge them all here.

That was a lot. I’m probably breaking every newsletter rule out there with the length of these but if you made it this far you deserve some sort of medal.

I want to thank you for being here and I hope to see many of you next week for this guided breathwork/visualization. I’m excited for it, it’s going to be a really cool shared experience.

My hope for this newsletter is that it becomes a place of pause in your inbox where you can reconnect with yourself, think a little deeper and become just a little more present.

Scott Barker

“Attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”- Simone Weil.

*To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #3 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How my brain remembers my 5-MeO-DMT ceremony

2. How my soul remember my 5-MeO-DMT ceremony

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

I wrote most of this from Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka and I’m sending it out from Kathmandu, Nepal 👋

It’s been a few weeks since I sat down to write.

I took an intentional digital detox away from my phone, laptop and all social media for a little while.

I was enjoying my last days in Lombok and getting my mind and body prepared for a five day 5-MeO DMT retreat.

And after the profound experience I had, I have struggled to write anything since.

If you’re not familiar, 5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is an incredibly potent, psychedelic substance found naturally in a variety of plant species and in the venom of the Bufo alvarius toad (also known as the Sonoran Desert toad).

It’s widely accepted as the most powerful psychedelic known to science.

And when treated with the respect it deserves and done in the proper setting with the proper guides, it can be one of the most profound/life-changing experiences you’ll ever experience.

Most people describe a complete dissolution of their ego or an “ego death”, a loss of identity and all sensory boundaries, feeling of merging with everything in the universe (non-duality), intense states of light/unity/presence and spiritual encounters that feel beyond words.

I guess in this newsletter, I’ve given myself the fool’s errand of trying to describe an experience that is well beyond the grasp of human language - wish me luck.

I’ll start by saying that I’m not a stranger to psychedelics or plant medicine. I started experimenting recreationally with mushrooms when I was about 16 and LSD more than a handful of times after that.

Most of those experiences were centred around “trying to trip out”, making things seem funnier or just some good ole fashioned partying.

But every now and again, while under the influence, I would have these random moments of clarity, deep insights or feelings of intense connections with the universe around me.

Those moments drove me to want to explore further.

In 2019, I travelled down to the Amazon Jungle (through Iquitos, Peru) and lived on the banks of the Amazon River alongside a tribe who had no running water or electricity.

Over the course of ten days, I participated in four Ayahuasca ceremonies led by an eight-generation Curandero. That’s a story for another edition but the experience had a huge impact on my life.

Just over a year later, a friend of mine invited me to a 5-MeO-DMT retreat on Bowen Island.

My life was never the same after that experience.

Over the next five years I would be lucky enough to grow a deep friendship with the founders of the retreat, Enfold.

So when they invited me back to participate in a documentary they were filming about 5-MeO, I jumped on a flight from Indonesia all the way back to BC.

Oh yea, not only was I doing the most powerful psychedelic known to science again but the whole thing was going to be filmed…

In the following edition, I’m going to write about my experience from the perspective of my mind, body and soul.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

I’ll preface this section by saying, I believe that the mind is a pretty unreliable narrator for deep, somatic medicines like 5-MeO, but I’ll give it a shot.

Here’s how my brain remembers the experience:

By the time I pull the vapor into my lungs and fall back onto the mat, I am no longer Scott.

I no longer have a body, I no longer have a mind, I no longer have an ego. I’ve become no one.

It feels very overwhelming and disorientating.

I’ve heard people talk about going through different planes of reality and that does feel like a good way to describe what felt like a transcension into a deeper sense of peace/understanding/knowing.

Time does not exist wherever I am.

After what feels like a lifetime of being nobody, I now feel as if I am everything all at once.

I’m every person on earth, I’m every being, every emotion, every thought, every little floating atom. It’s like I’ve become just a vessel for energy/experience to flow through.

It’s beautiful. It’s a lot but it’s beautiful.

I have the sense that I’m remembering something really important that I forgot. How could I forget? There’s a lot of pain/anger that I could forget yet there is no judgment. There’s no one to judge.

And then all at once it feels as if I’ve come home and there is an overwhelming feeling of peace that is completely beyond words. A glimpse into the divine and the oneness of all things. A place well beyond our everyday human struggles, suffering and trauma.

I’d like to stay there.

But somewhere in that space, I get this understanding that there is other work to be done on what we’ll call “another plane” and I start to get a flicker of Scott coming online again.

And this is when it gets difficult.

I vaguely understand that I’m a human again and parts of my identity are there but all of the pieces of my personality that I’ve carefully built over the years to protect me are not there.

I’m a very raw version of myself, childlike or even an infant.

There’s a lot of fear there. As adults, we learn mechanisms and tricks to deal with fear but I don’t have those wherever I am.

It feels as if the fear is consuming me. An elusive, almost serpent-like energy that keeps shifting forms and never stays still for long.

Something inside me tells me to go towards it so I reluctantly do. Not to confront but more to understand. As soon as I’m able to look at it directly, the fear subsides.

It’s like I removed fear’s mask and I’m able to see what is behind it. Behind it is a lot of pain, anger, frustration, betrayal, shame, frustration and guilt. Built up from years and years of ‘manning up’, compartmentalizing or distracting/intoxicating myself.

And then I just let it all out, sob uncontrollably, let myself deeply feel all of those emotions. I vaguely remember my body contorting in some very bizarre ways and aggressively pulling on my hair.

Through it, I feel held and supported. There is no use running anymore, thirty-three years of emotions come up and out of my body.

It doesn’t sound pretty but it’s as if I’m ‘throwing up’ energy that’s been stored in my body for as long as I can remember. I’m not physically vomiting but, in that same aggressive way that we sometimes get rid of toxic materials in our body, I’m violently relieving myself of pent up energy.

That goes on until there’s none left and eventually I come back ‘home’ again. The tears are no longer from anger or sadness but from gratitude.

Gratitude that I get to have this human experience, gratitude for all the hard things I went through to bring me here, gratitude for the people I love, gratitude for everything.

I look at my hands and start to remember who I am.

Not the story, not the character, not the ego but who I am (who we all are) at the core.

I feel a light in every cell of my body. I remember again.

Please take a moment to support our partners Optimizing.ai and Dreamfuel.

I’ve been incredibly intentional with who I partner with on this next chapter of my life. I believe that both of these companies exist to make the world a better place.

Optimizing.ai gives you real-time emotional intelligence for digital experiences - powered by AI, captured by webcam. You can now stop guessing what your users actually feel. Now accepting a limited amount of beta customers.

Dreamfuel delivers world class mental performance coaching for startup leaders and teams, all backed by the latest Neuroscience. Every subscriber of Wake Up Call is eligible for a free 1-1 guided visualization and breathwork coaching session.

for.and.from.the.body. 🫂

When an animal experiences a threat, it will often tremble long after the danger passes to release the built-up energy.

Humans rarely do this beyond rare expectations after acute trauma. Conditioned by social restraint, we don’t allow ourselves to release - so where does the energy go?

It lives through imprints in our nervous system, muscles, fascia, and even our cellular chemistry.

This is far from just ancient somatic wisdom, it’s modern neuroscience.

When something traumatic or highly stressful happens, you enter fight, flight or freeze mode which is essentially a cascade of biochemicals: stress hormones, cortisol, adrenaline and inflammatory cytokines.

If an event goes on for too long or is too overwhelming to process, your body may never fully return to baseline ie. you stay partially “on guard”.

It can look like tension in the jaw, shallow breathing, clenched gut, hypervigilance or chronicle fatigue. Essentially those biochemicals keep circulating, altering immune function, digestion and even gene expression.

I knew all of this intellectually but it never really hit home for me until this past retreat.

Most of my issues I entrusted the mighty brain to work through. Looking at events from all angles, trying to understand it, empathize, scrutinize, pick it apart, dissect it like a scientist.

I’ve learned that this way of processing only gets you so far.

During the ceremony, I felt a feeling of deep release/relief in my throat, shoulders, gut and hips. Which all happen to be areas that I struggle with in my normal, day to day life.

When I left the ceremony space, I felt like two hundred pounds had been lifted off of my body and I’ve walked around lighter ever since.

I’m now convinced that the brain actually has very little to do with dealing with the stress of life, relief is found in the body.

Here is a quick 10-Minute Somatic Release Practice to help:

1. Arrive (1 min)

• Sit or stand somewhere safe, close your eyes, unclench your jaw, drop your shoulders and loosen your gut.

• Take three slow breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth

• Whisper, “I’m safe to feel”

2. Scan and Sense (2 min)

• Ask quietly “Where am I holding tension?”

• Bring your attention to the top of your head and slowly scan down your body stopping at each part of your body until you reach your toes.

• Do not judge, do not analyze, just feel the sensation

3. Breathe into the Spot (2 min)

• Wherever the sensation feels strongest, imagine breathing directly into that place. As you exhale, picture the tissue softening.

• If emotions arise (angers, tears, frustration, warmth, shaking) let them out. You’re helping your body complete a cycle it once froze.

• Remember: “You’re allowed to let go.”

4. Micro-Movement (2 min)

• Start moving intuitively with the sensation ie. roll your shoulders, stretch your neck, sway your torso, shake your hands, maybe even dance or jump around a bit. Let the body lead, not the mind.

• Imagine that you’re unfreezing that area. Tremors or yawns are a good sign - that’s your nervous system discharging stored energy.

5. Integration (3 min)

• Sit or lie still, place one hand on your heart and one on your lower belly, feel the rhythm of your breath syncing the two.

• Let gratitude arise for your body and all it does for you every day.

• Acknowledge with: “I hear you and thank you for holding so much.”

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

After my ceremony, I walked up a sunny pathway to a living room with big bay windows overlooking the ocean and a huge comfy couch.

Exhausted, I immediately fell asleep for four hours. I woke up in a bit of a haze and felt the urge to write.

This is what I wrote in my notebook:

–

The cosmic dance has been going on since the first hint of light appeared in the darkness.

We don’t know where this light came from but it began to rapidly multiple across the universe.

Beautiful speckles of light in all sizes began to pierce the darkness.

Through this new light, synchronicities flourished and thousands of interconnected pathways forward were illuminated.

Atoms began to pair up based on beauty and polar attraction: no longer crashing together at random.

Creation and Order began to intertwine. And soon it looked as if all would be light.

But darkness began to fight back. It could not stop the light but it could create more darkness.

So all that is and all that was began to expand.

The darkness grew and grew into an unconscious never ending expanse of black.

In response, the light started shining brighter and tried to match the expansion as best it could.

The push and pull between these opposing forces began.

They became locked into a battle of creation and growth.

More darkness created every second. More light created just as quickly.

This stalemate went on for countless aeons.

But as the millenia passed, the light began to acquire a collective intelligence of sorts and a divine plan started to take form.

The light believed that the only way to break the impasse was to transmute the darkness into light.

And for another million years the light tried every possible way to change the dark into light. It could shine it away for a while but it would always return.

It needed to create a new force in the universe, a force that could hold both at the same time: the light and the dark. And that force could choose which to embody, finally turning the tide.

Only the brightest lights were chosen for the task. These lights would explode and through this chaos capture some of the dark to form a new force in the world.

We call this new force consciousness. An ability to understand the dark and the light.

This force would be fully aware of these dual forces at work. They would spend hundreds of thousands of years trying to describe them in stories, scriptures and drawings.

They would call them love or fear, god or devil, Vishnu or Shiva.

Yet most would forget the divine plan and spend most of their time wondering: why am I here?

Each night, the light would cover the sky in hopes of reminding them.

But with every passing year, the new force made its world increasingly more complex to busy itself long enough that the agitating feeling of both knowing and not knowing ‘why’ would dull.

So many stopped looking up.

Though, there were some that kept searching.

And if they were lucky in moments of deep stillness or connection they would start to remember.

Some would find it by smiling at a stranger, helping a friend, consoling a loved one or breaking a toxic pattern. In those moments they knew.

They would remember that the task ahead is a simple one; they are here to turn pain into understanding, fear into love and darkness into light.

For themselves, for others, for all beings, as there is no difference.

They are here to join the dance.

–

If you’re curious about this medicine or retreat, you can check out more at Enfold.org. I’ll be sharing the documentary when it’s released.

latest.podcast.interview.

In episode twelve, I sit down with Nirosha Methananda, a celebrated marketing executive across Tech and the Founder of Sati Marketing.

In this conversation, Nirosha opens up about the fear, pressure and pain that shaped her drive. She bravely shares the abuse she endured and how she beat the negative inner voice inside her head. And ultimately her rebuilding a new definition of success rooted in self-trust, not survival.

You can also catch up on episodes with Michael King, Townsend Wardlaw, Antonio Zivanovic and Anna Heiny - you can binge them all here.

That’s it from me, thank you for being here.

My hope for this newsletter is that it becomes a place of pause in your inbox where you can reconnect with yourself, think a little deeper and become momentarily present.

I’m about to embark on a 16 day trek to Everest Base Camp so wish me luck - I’ll see you on the other side ✌️

Scott Barker

“Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.”- Zhuangzi

***To try to keep the integrity of this project, I don’t use AI for any copy-writing or proof-reading (only some research). I am a human, I write like a human and humans make grammar/spelling mistakes. Writing mistakes might not be around for much longer so I hope you enjoy them while you can :)

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Welcome to edition #2 of The Wake Up Call, this week I write about:

1. How my journey to become somebody left me empty

2. Five practices that you can do in under five minutes proven to reduce stress

This newsletter is for anyone who is questioning the endless pursuit of more. Stories about reinvention, burnout, workaholism and a search for deeper meaning in life.

Subscribe now

My hope is that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, this little slot in your messy inbox gives you a brief moment of reprieve and reflection.

A space where you can pause, think a little deeper, hopefully read some truth and get back in touch with yourself before you have to join the chaotic dance once again.

Currently writing to you from Lombok, Indonesia. Spent yesterday diving with manta rays and getting back in touch with nature.

It’s a strange feeling but I still don’t recognize my life right now. Only three months ago I had my whole life mapped out and it looked a hell of a lot different than it does right now.

I was a Partner at a successful VC fund, I had the house, the car, the watch. People in my life had admiration for what I had accomplished (which may have been the whole reason for my insatiable drive in the first place but maybe we’ll cover that another day).

On paper my life was going exactly how I had planned it to go. Ever since I can remember, I wanted to do big things. I wanted to be the most successful person I knew.

I wanted to ‘be somebody’.

And I did it.

I was finally ‘somebody’.

‘Somebody’ that I couldn't recognize. Somebody that was completely disconnected from himself and the people around him. Somebody who felt empty inside. Somebody who couldn’t sleep. Somebody who needed to escape reality constantly.

There were so many sacrifices made along the way. Each one felt like I was trading a little piece of my present self for the fever dream that in the future, once I had ‘made it’, I could cash it all in. Almost like I was gambling with my soul.

But when the jackpot didn’t make me feel any better then my solution was: ‘well, I just need to bet bigger, think bigger and then the next jackpot will do it.’ That’s the answer.

More.

A bigger fund, bigger house, bigger car, nicer watch, more respect. That will do it.

TL;DR

It didn’t do it.

What it did was lead to depression, anxiety, addiction and a really big wake up call.

But it did bring me to my knees in a way that I could no longer ignore, and forced me to start looking around, asking questions and going inwards.

This is how I found myself in Indonesia with my childhood best friend and everything I own rolled into a single backpack, with no return date in sight. I don’t know where we’ll end up after Bali but Sri-Lanka, Vietnam, Nepal and India are on the near-term hit list.

I’ve already met so many people on the road who have shared their own wake up call and it’s been reassuring to hear that I’m not the only one who is called to search for some answers. There are a lot of seekers out there and if you’re reading this, I imagine you are one too.

This is not a call for everyone to leave their whole life behind, sell everything they own and go on some life-altering spiritual odyssey. But this is my path and I want to share it in hopes that it reaches some seekers out there. And that some of my learnings/words help you to remain curious, keep you searching inward and expanding your awareness/consciousness. I believe we can seek and connect from anywhere.

“When you’re already in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to get there.” - Ram Dass

The idea that if you're already fully present - right where you are - you don’t need any instruments, journeys, or transformations to arrive. You're already there.

for.and.from.the.mind. 🧠

If you caught my latest solo podcast episode, you’ll hear me read a passage from Alan Watts’ ‘The Book’, and I thought it was worth sharing the full, longer version here along with some reflections:

“For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat‑race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. And when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.”

For some bizarre reason,I re-read this about 10-15 times.

I think it’s the unflinching take on existence - stripped away of all the romanticized ideas of being human. And when you internalize it, at least for me, there’s both a feeling of: ‘that can’t be all there is’ and ‘if that’s all this is, why do I get so worked up about about stupid sh*t?’

The dual feeling of dissolving the illusion of self-importance and, on the other hand, an awe of the cosmic mystery that makes it “more marvelous than futile.”

Reflecting on myself as merely a tube makes this whole human thing feel a lot less serious. And my ambition to be the top type of tube almost laughable.

Please take a moment to support our partners Optimizing.ai and Dreamfuel.

I’ve been incredibly intentional with who I partner with on this next chapter of my life. I believe that both of these companies exist to make the world a better place.

Optimizing.ai gives you real-time emotional intelligence for digital experiences - powered by AI, captured by webcam. You can now stop guessing what your users actually feel. For a limited time, readers of Wake Up Call can get a 2 month free trial simply by mentioning this newsletter.

Dreamfuel delivers world class mental performance coaching for startup leaders and teams, all backed by the latest Neuroscience. Every listener or subscriber of Wake Up Call is eligible for a free 1-1 coaching session. I’ve personally been coached by the Dreamfuel team and can’t speak more highly of my experience.

for.and.from.the.body. 🫂

It’s not lost on me that these days I’m in a fortunate position of having a lot more free time than usual. This enables me to work out, practice yoga, meditate and do breathwork almost daily.

Of course that wasn’t always the case and I imagine your life, like most, can get extremely hectic, so what can we do if we only have five minutes?

Here are 5 practices that take < 5 minutes that are proven to lower your stress levels:

1. Physiological Sigh

• Inhale deeply through your nose

• Take a second short sip of air at the top

• Long exhale through your mouth (slow and full)

• Repeat 3–5x

This lowers CO2 levels, reduces heart rate and calms your system faster than meditation.

2. Vagus Nerve Activation

• Choose one: humming, cold water on your face, gargle with water intensely or gently apply pressure behind your ears

Stimulating the vagus nerve shifts you from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest mode.

3. Physical Discharge

• Pick one physical micro-move to release built-up adrenaline: shake your arms/hands/legs rapidly (like animals do after a threat); jump in place for 30 seconds; push against a wall with full tension then release; do 10 air squats or a plank hold.

Stress is often stuck in the body. A burst of movement resets the loop.

4. Re-orient with Your Senses

• Quick grounding technique: 5-4-3-2-1

• Name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste

Reconnects you to the present moment, reduces mental spiralling.

5. Micro-Mantra

• Say something silently like “I am here. I am safe. This moment will pass.”

• Repeat 5-10 times

This will creates a mental pattern break and release your thought-loops.

for.and.from.the.soul. 🧘

“O you who are going in circles,
please stop.
What are you doing it for?

“I cannot be without going,
because I don’t know where to go.
That’s why I go in circles.”

O you who are going in circles,
please stop.

“But if I stop going,
I will stop being.”

O my friend who is going in circles,
you are not one with
this crazy business of going in circles.
You may enjoy going,
but not going in circles.

“Where can I go?”

Go where you find your beloved,
where you can find yourself.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

A beautiful poem that Thich wrote titled “Going In Circles” in his book “Call Me By My Trues Names”. The line “I cannot be without going” hits home for me, my entire identity was built around going.

If you haven’t stumbled upon Thich Nhat Hanh before he is one of the ‘fathers of mindfulness’, a Vietnamese zen buddhist monk and global spiritual leader. The Dharma Talk below is a great introduction.

I’ll warn you that he speaks very slowly and it can be jarring to listen to when you’re in the hustle/bustle of life. If you’re curious to listen to it, I’d recommend carving out an hour to go on a nice, solo walk and toss it in your eardrums.

latest.podcast.interview.

In my second interview, I sit down with Tessa Whittaker, VP of Rev Ops at Zoominfo.

In this conversation, Tessa opens up about the slow drift into burnout, the cost of abandoning your inner signals, and what it takes to build a life that actually feels like yours.

We talk through nervous system awareness, boundaries that hold, and redefining success without self-betrayal.

I’ve also released new episodes with Steve Rio, Justin Welsh and Kyle Lacy - you can binge them all here.

That’s it for me, thanks for being here.

It’s cool to see how much this little project has grown already. I appreciate your curiosity and support. Keep seeking.

See you next week ✌️

Scott Barker

Don’t hanker after what you don’t have. Instead, fix your attention on the finest and best that you do have—and imagine how much you would long for these if they weren’t already yours. - Marcus Aurelius