Years ago, I went on a trip to St. Kitts with my foster brother and best friend Bob. While we were there, we got it into our heads that we should go scuba diving. The problem was that Bob had his certification and I did not. But Bob has always been one of the best salesmen I have ever known, so we found an old retired hippie schoolteacher who was the divemaster for the dive shop, and we made our case. I explained how I had been using SCBA equipment at work for a couple of decades and that breathing through a mask was already comfortable for me. How we convinced him or why he allowed it, we will never know. But he let me do the two dives with the group, and I managed to survive.
Something happened on one of those dives that has stayed with me ever since. Once I got underwater and regulated my breathing, I noticed that impurities and particles and other things were constantly floating past my face. I was swimming through them, embedded in them, and because I was in water instead of air, I could see them. And then something clicked. I realized that the air I breathe every day is no different. There are always things floating around in our environment, whether we are in the water or in the air, but our brains have a way of filtering out what doesn’t seem important. For the first time in my life, I became aware that I had been swimming in something my entire life without seeing it, and the only reason I could see it now was because I had entered an environment unfamiliar enough to make the invisible visible.
That experience changed the way I think about a lot of things, but it has been especially useful in helping me understand something that a developmental psychologist named Robert Kegan describes in his book The Evolving Self. Kegan uses the term embeddedness to describe what I experienced on that dive, except he is not talking about particles in water. He is talking about culture. The idea is that at every stage of human development, we are embedded in something, a set of assumptions, a worldview, a way of making sense of the world, and we cannot see it because we are inside it. The fish cannot examine the water because the water is not something the fish experiences as separate from itself. The water is just how things are. And this is exactly the relationship most people have with the culture they live in. Its values feel like your own values, its priorities feel like your own priorities, and the things it rewards feel like the things that are genuinely worth doing, because you have never been given a serious reason to question that assumption.
I spent the first thirteen weeks of this series writing about childhood. About how we adapt, how we learn to perform versions of ourselves that earn love and safety, how the personality that forms in those early years is often an accumulation of fragments assembled from the outside in. If any of that resonated with you, I want to ask you to consider something that might be uncomfortable. What if the adaptation did not end when childhood ended? What if you walked out of your family system and directly into a larger system that rewarded the exact same performance, and what if that system was so big and so familiar that you never noticed the transition?
Because that is what I believe happens to most of us. The child who learned to read the room and become whoever the environment needed them to be grows up and enters a workforce that pays them to do exactly that. The one who learned to suppress their own needs in order to keep the peace at home becomes the employee who absorbs unreasonable demands without pushing back because that is what a good team player does. And the kid who was praised for being mature, for not causing problems, for holding things together, becomes the adult who builds a career around being reliable and competent and available, and who has no idea that the entire operation is powered by the same survival strategy they developed at six years old.
The culture did not create the adaptation. Childhood did that. But the culture took one look at the adapted self and said, this is exactly what we need.
I see the evidence of this in my practice every single week. My office is full of adults who have spent their entire working lives doing jobs they despise, creating products that have no connection to who they are as individuals, building generational wealth for their CEOs and the company’s board members while their own lives feel like something they are surviving rather than living. Many of them work shifts that leave their nervous systems so dysregulated that when they finally get time off, they cannot enjoy it. The weekend arrives and they don’t know what to do with themselves because the part of them that would know, the part that has preferences and passions and curiosity, has been offline for so long that it barely registers anymore. They sit on the couch and scroll through their phones or they fill the hours with errands and obligations, and by Sunday evening the dread of Monday morning has already settled into their chest. They come to therapy because they know something is wrong, and what they describe is a life organized entirely around someone else’s priorities.
And the remarkable thing, the thing that keeps striking me the harder I look at it, is that the culture calls this normal. Responsible. Just being an adult. The person who shows up every day to a job they hate, who pushes through exhaustion without complaining, who puts the company’s needs ahead of their own health and relationships and inner life, is seen as a good employee. They get promoted and praised at the annual review. And the message they receive, which sounds almost identical to the message they received as children, is: your value is measured by what you produce for us.
This is what I mean by efficiency, scale, and control. These are the values that modern Western culture runs on, and they have very little room for coherence. Coherence, as we explored earlier in this series, is the state where what you feel on the inside and what you express on the outside are aligned. It is individual, it is slow, and it is deeply personal. You cannot standardize it or put it on a spreadsheet or measure it in quarterly earnings. A coherent person might need to take a walk in the middle of the workday because their body is telling them something, or say no to a promotion because the role would require them to abandon something that matters to them, or question a policy that everyone else has accepted without examination. That kind of unpredictability is dangerous to systems that depend on compliance to function.
Certainty, on the other hand, scales beautifully. A culture built on certainty can move thirty children through a classroom in predictable increments. It can move a thousand employees through a corporate structure using standardized performance reviews. It can move millions of consumers through an economy by telling them what to want and when to want it. Certainty is efficient. Certainty is controllable. And certainty, unlike coherence, does not require anyone to slow down and ask whether the thing they are doing actually feels true.
The education system is usually the first place this becomes visible, although most of us don’t notice it until much later. Think about what school actually rewards. The child who raises their hand with the correct answer is praised, while the one who sits with a question, who turns it over, who isn’t sure yet, who wants to feel their way into something before committing to a response, is told to hurry up. Coloring inside the lines gets held up as an example. Experimenting, wondering what would happen if you used a different color or went outside the border, gets corrected. Over the course of twelve or sixteen or twenty years of education, most people learn that knowing is more valuable than sensing, that arriving at an answer is more important than staying with a question, and that the person who sounds certain will always be taken more seriously than the person who sounds present.
By the time that person enters the workforce, the lesson is complete. The adapted self, which was already built to perform whatever the environment required, now has institutional backing. The workplace does not want you to be coherent. It wants you to be consistent, to produce predictable results, meet measurable goals, and keep your internal experience out of the equation entirely. And because this is the same arrangement you made with your family at age five, because compliance in exchange for approval is the only model of belonging many people have ever known, the whole thing feels natural. It feels like this is just how life works. The water is invisible.
I want to be clear about something here, because I think it matters. Systems do important things. Schools educate, companies create livelihoods, and communities provide belonging. These things are real and they matter. The problem is that the values these systems run on, efficiency, predictability, control, certainty, are not the same values that a human being needs in order to feel alive. And when a person who was already adapted to prioritize someone else’s needs enters a system that rewards them for continuing to do exactly that, the original wound from childhood does not heal. It deepens. The adaptation gets reinforced by a paycheck, by a title, by a sense of purpose that comes from being useful, and the person drifts further and further from the coherence that was already underground by the time they were ten years old.
This is what embeddedness looks like when it is operating at full strength. The person cannot see the system because the system feels like reality. The values of the culture feel like common sense. The exhaustion feels like the price of being a responsible adult. And the tug of authenticity that we talked about last week, that persistent pull toward something truer, gets written off as impractical or selfish or immature. You have bills to pay. You have people depending on you. You cannot afford to wonder whether the life you are living is actually yours.
Except the tug does not stop. That is the thing about coherence, about the Self, about whatever name you want to give the part of you that was there before the adaptation took hold. It does not care about your quarterly review or your mortgage payment or the story you have built about why this is fine, why you should be grateful, why other people have it worse. It keeps pulling because pulling is what it does. And the longer you ignore it, the louder it gets, although it rarely gets louder in ways you expect. It gets louder as insomnia, as irritability, as a drink at the end of the day that used to be optional and now feels necessary, as a flatness that settles over your weekends and your vacations and your relationships until everything feels like it is happening behind glass.
If you are reading this and something in you is recognizing itself in these words, I want you to know that the recognition is important. You are beginning to see the water. And seeing the water is the first step toward understanding that you do not have to keep swimming in it the same way you have always swum.
We are going to spend the next twelve weeks looking at how this works. How certainty gets rewarded over presence, how identity gets moralized, how speed replaces sensing, how obedience becomes the price of belonging. None of it is designed to make you angry at the systems you live in. All of it is designed to help you see them clearly enough to start choosing for yourself what you take in and what you let float past.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: When Knowing the Right Answer Matters More Than Being Present
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
