In 1993 I performed four times a week at the Palladium in London’s West End, and at the end of every week I’d be handed a small brown envelope with my name on it.
Inside was £15. An unremarkable sum, but compared to my siblings I was nothing short of an entertainment tycoon!
I saved every penny, and after three months I became the first person in my family to buy a CD player. At 11 years old I felt like a tech pioneer.
16 years later, the promise of music changed, promising every song ever recorded in my pocket. It was 2009 and Spotify had just added the ability to download music to my phone.
So I boxed up hundreds of discs and traded them in at my local CEX. Years of careful curation reduced to a barcode scan and a voucher for 50 pence.
Unlimited music for the monthly cost of a CD felt like a no-brainer.
But I wasn’t trading up, I was trading memories.
Each disc was a waypoint. Love Is All Around wasn’t a CD single, it was a 12 year old joining the conversation. Grace, a reminder of lost love, then a celebration of being rid of it. American Idiot, the memory of crumpled headphones and a festival tent in the rain.
The market told me those plastic discs were obsolete. And I believed it.
Now I have access to seventy million songs and I can’t remember the last time I listened to an album all the way through. The algorithm curates. I scroll. The friction that forced me to sit with an album I wasn’t sure about, the one that took three listens before it cracked open, is gone.
I have endless choice and I can’t choose anything.
And I don’t sit with the ‘wrong’ choices for long enough to learn the lessons they want to teach me.
Freedom needs a little friction
The promise of limitless access sounds great: live life on your own terms.
But that’s nothing more than a slogan wielded by everyone from slick internet gurus to global juggernauts to make you feel like you are not complete without the thing they’re selling.
The putrid fruit of the system is everywhere: the platforms that keep you hidden so you’re forced to buy reach or keep posting, the dating apps that need you to stay lonely to prop up their business model, the streaming services that now show you an ad every time you hit pause.
Here’s the con: whilst the Isolation Economy is spinning its fable that the goal is complete freedom, it’s not actually designed to help you achieve that dream. It is designed to keep you in endless pursuit of it.
And it keeps you consuming by raising your standards to an impossibly high, frictionless level.
The metrics might say your post flopped, so you ignore the single ‘like’ that could transform your business. A date might introduce you to someone nervous, and perfect for you, but you’re one swipe away from a better first impression. The all-you-can-eat streaming buffet means you scroll endlessly, terrified of wasting ninety minutes on the wrong film. And when you do finally hit play, you don’t settle in; you quietly compare and check the reviews for the other options on your phone.
Welcome to the optimisation of the human experience.
What a dreary way to live.
And the personal paradox is brutal. Even if you could successfully engineer your days to be lived entirely on your own terms, why would you want to?
Given the choice, most of us would willingly engineer the redundancies, the heartbreaks, and the budget limitations out of the equation. But it was the redundancy that taught you empathy. It was the break-up that created a space for a new love to fill. It was the limited budget to buy just one album that made you lean in and really listen.
Living life on your own terms eliminates the very thing that reveals who you are and what you are here to do.
Friction.
Preparation is over
Movement 3, the Book of Action, will maintain what the first two Movements established: you are everything you need. There’s nothing to add, no external validation you need, and no flaw that’s deep enough to stop you from taking the next step.
And everything the coming chapters explore begins and ends with what Presence and Empathy have returned you to: wholeness.
But friction is like the wind.
Without these interior foundations to brace you, you will inevitably reach for the alternative when the pressure builds: your survival mechanisms, learned behaviours, and market conditioning.
Not what is true about you, but what you believe about your world will force its way to the surface: if you believe it will be a battle, you’ll fight when you don’t need to; if you believe you have to prove your worth, you’ll perform until you burn out; if you believe you need everyone to like you, your voice will never rise above the noise.
Wholeness.
It’s not just a nice idea. It’s the furnace.
And it’s arguably as close as anyone can get to living life on your own terms. But it has a fatal flaw of its own: it cannot endure without contact.
Consider a piano. It can be complete with every key, string and pedal. But without contact it will slowly drift out of tune. It needs both maintenance and a musician to release its melody.
It’s why our work needs two contact points. Fellowship and friction. We need contact that illuminates who we are and reveals what the work is truly asking of us. Both offer the context that prevents wholeness from calcifying into a form of self-indulgent paralysis and gives the furnace a reason to burn.
When you are truly grounded in your wholeness, you feel devastatingly different.
You become super-natural. Not in an ethereal or abstract sense, but finally connected with your true nature.
Whole and unashamed.
In a landscape so thoroughly deformed by extraction, certainty, and convenience, to be deeply, profoundly human looks like a miracle.
And that’s the rub. The world won’t get you. The system can no longer contain you, and the algorithm can no longer categorise you. Which creates its own kind of isolation.
It’s why fellowship and friction are critical.
It’s why you can’t just wallow in your revelation; your wholeness needs to actually arrive for the people your journey of empathy helped you notice. And it needs the decisiveness that your presence has awakened in you.
Your wholeness needs a direction of travel.
From who to how
And so the question shifts.
We’re no longer exploring who you are, but how you actually stand when the wind picks up. Because just as faith without works is dead, wholeness without a direction of travel is just self-indulgence.
I know many practitioners who hold their wholeness beautifully. They speak truth with quiet authority, grounded in their Majesty, unmoved by the market’s demands. And paralysed by its silence. Not because the truth isn’t real, but because they speak a language it doesn’t understand.
They know who they are, and it’s not enough.
Wholeness is a lightning rod. It attracts the energy, grounds the charge, holds the voltage. But without the craft, the pacing, the deliberate means to channel it, and the decisiveness to actually use it when the moment arrives, it might as well be a piano without a musician.
Nothing more than an ornament in a room.
Wholeness is not the destination. It is the root. The ground beneath your feet and the confidence to rise. But what good is all that confidence if you don’t give yourself the permission and the means to let your lungs rip?
What makes you super-natural isn’t what you feel, it’s who you serve with it.
Your instrument was designed to be played.
To fumble the notes, learn new songs, and struggle through the friction.
None of it was ever supposed to be seamless. The challenges we face are not symbolic of our shortcomings, they are the very things our work needs to thrive.
We need contact with the rain.
The diagnosis will arrive. The algorithm will bury your work. The pipeline will dry up. These things aren’t sent to test you, they are sent to teach you. And when they arrive, wholeness alone won’t help you distribute your weight.
Knowing who you are is the foundation.
Now we learn how to stand.
Rise in the wind
To help steady you for the road ahead, I have prepared a benediction. Please take a moment to plant your feet before you rise.
As you read, imagine we are standing shoulder to shoulder facing the storm together. I know what it’s like to hide in the safety of preparation, to crave a frictionless life, and to lose your nerve when the market goes quiet. And I know we’re ready to make contact.
These aren’t words I’ve written for you, they are words I’ve written for us.
May you choose to rise.
May you choose friction. A life that refuses to be defined by limitless access, frictionless momentum, and the illusion of living entirely on your own terms.
May you choose to rise.
May you choose contact. A life that refuses to treat your wholeness as a priceless instrument, kept perfectly safe but tragically left unplayed.
May you choose to rise.
May you choose movement. A life that refuses to wallow in self-indulgent revelation, paralysed by the market’s silence or the fear of being misunderstood.
May you choose to rise.
May you choose the storm. A life that refuses to view the empty pipeline, the sudden shift, or the arriving diagnosis as a test, but trusts they were sent to teach you.
May you rise where the work gets messy.
Where you fumble the notes but learn the song.
Where you allow the rough edges to shape you into something real.
Where your wholeness is finally given a direction of travel.
Where you realise that accepting who you are is just the beginning.
Where you become super-natural, whole and unashamed.
Where you finally learn how to stand.
And arrive for the people who need you.
Where We Are:
This is Week 28 of a year-long practice.
Movement 3: Action - eight weeks exploring the architecture of conscious action, how to stand in the weather, and the courage to make contact.
Super / Natural ← You are here
Rip a Hole in the Night Sky
The Distorted Creator
Touch the Leper
Present Like an Artist
You Can’t Steer a Ship That Isn’t Moving
Why You’ll Fail
Icon / Action Taker