Synthetic Awareness

Synthetic living is manifested by being situationally aware which requires us to be self-aware. To do so, we must stop placing our own feelings and sense of identity at the center of every situation.

As a child, I remember when synthetic fibers of rayon, nylon, and other space-age polymers began to replace the natural fibers of cotton and wool. I remember wearing Polo-like shirts made from these synthetic materials. The best thing to say about them was that they were hot and itchy.

Today, synthetic fibers have grown up. Almost daily, I wear a Western-style shirt called The Eddy, not named for me, by the Jackson Hole outdoor apparel company Stio. They are my favorite shirts. I have so many of them, I could wear a different one every day for almost a month.

The Eddy Shirt Long Sleeve

The research that Stio has done to develop all their clothing and gear is focused on the reality that outdoors enthusiasts face. Live in Jackson, as I did for several years, you may find yourself biking into town, floating your fly-fishing drift boat down the Snake River, skiing in the backcountry, hiking up the Grand, venturing out into the Grand Teton National Park to take photos of Moose and Bear, or hanging out at my favorite place, Bin22, for dinner and drinks with family and friends. It is an idyllic place to live.

The idea of synthetic living came to me from the inspiration of living in the West of Yellowstone fame. It is a very open, generative way of living. You respond to your environment. If the weather suits, you go hiking or you hop in your car as I would do and drive up to Yellowstone National Park to hopefully catch sight of the wolves in the Lamar Valley. What you do not do is believe that the natural environment is some simulated theme park off an exit on an Interstate highway.

Life becomes a synthesis of the harsh realities of nature and the gear that enables people to thrive in a dangerous environment, and the wonder and beauty of the natural world.

This is Synthetic living.

We face reality. Not the simulated reality of politicians, newsreaders, social media fact-checkers, or corporate spokespersons. The real world is not always a happy place. It isn’t safe, secure, or predictable. It does not bend to our will. We adapt to its will. We learn that human beings are highly-intelligent, adaptive, and physically fragile beings. Nature isn’t machine-like. It is reality.

Synthetic Knowledge

Late last year, I wrote about Synthetic Networks and Synthetic Learning.

There are two kinds of knowledge in the world today.

There is institutional knowledge. This is the understanding of how a particular business or industry works.

There is synthetic knowledge. This other kind is open and is a synthetization of a wide range of categories of knowledge. It is open and available online. It comes from many different sources so it requires all the various strands of knowledge to be woven together into a coherent, synthetic form.

Synthetic learning connects a wide range of information from diverse fields of knowledge in such a way that it makes sense in the moment of awareness. This is a very right-brain creative activity.

This kind of learning involves intuition (Iain McGilchrist), tacit knowledge (Michael Polanyi), habitual knowledge (Aristotle), and is iterative and emergent.

Real learning is Iterative and Emergent.

We learn by repetition, not only by the act of practicing over and over again but by relearning in new contexts.

Iterative learning takes place in the context of networks of relationships.

We make mistakes. We fall down. We get up. We try again.

Real, deep learning emerges step-by-step, iteratively.

We learn from each other.

We change.

We ask for help. We offer help.

We are transformed, over and over again, day-by-day, week-by-week, year-by-year, all through our lives,

This is how iterative learning emerges in our lives.

Iterative, emergent learning is transformational.

Transformational is life lived at the edge of fulfillment and growth.

In our networks of relationships, this is how we can learn to change.

I call this Synthetic Learning because it synthesizes all our ideas and sensory experiences into an indwelling, embodied engagement with the reality of the world.

This kind of learning emerges piece by piece from our awareness of the world and our place in it.

We grasp the unfolding nature of wholeness as living knowledge that is always at hand.

Simulated Knowledge

Simulated Knowledge is knowledge based on a non-material mechanistic view of the world. This is the culture created by The Spectacle of the Real. It is never whole knowledge, but rather reductive, fragmented, atomistic knowledge. It is the knowledge of the exclusion of direct human experience and our encounters with one another.

The Culture of Simulation, as described in The Spectacle of the Real, is a non-material perception of the world. This means that we do not gain an understanding or awareness of this world through direct experience. Instead, it is a virtual world created not for amusement or a stimulus to imagine worlds beyond our own, but rather as a replacement for the material world of direct human experience.

The collision between the Synthetic and the Simulated worlds challenges people whose only perception of the world is through direct experience. They listen to leaders who are speaking from the world of The Spectacle believing that they can be trusted.

They do not realize that The Culture of Simulation as a replacement for The Culture of Reality and of Direct Experience is a world of lies that can only be sustained by more lies.

The lies born from the Simulation are not the lies of the material world, but rather the lies that have no logic or capacity to provide proof of what is true. Truth is a word without substance or reference to reality. It is simply an assertion of an idea that is ephemeral like the wind. The statements that reverberate out of the Culture of Simulation are intended to deflect and dissociate reality from the world that exists today.

The effect on us is to create fear, doubt, the suspension of our critical faculties, and ultimately a sequence of simulated engagement where the culture of simulation seduces us to believe in desires that have no grounding in reality, whose power of seduction produces in us a religious-like false consciousness that provides the ideal environment for the control of our lives.

Living Synthetically

If we want to live a synthetic life, we need to change our perception of who we are and how we fit into all the situations of our lives

We need to stop thinking mechanically. By this I mean, we don’t apply logic or our feelings as the ultimate criteria for decision-making or self-perception. Instead, we develop what I call situational awareness which is a product of self-awareness. This is simply being aware of your surroundings and taking note of your own reaction to what is happening. Here are a couple of examples.

Situation Awareness Example #1

You are driving at night on a multi-lane highway. You have other people in the car with you. You are driving over the posted speed limit. A quarter-mile in front of you a large box flies out of the back of a truck. The car in front of you blocks your vision of the box. Yet, your awareness notices slight changes in all the cars in front of you. They are slowing down, but not putting on their brakes. All of a sudden the car in front of you slams on its brakes and comes to a full stop at the box because there was no room in either lane, left or right. Because of your developed sense of situational awareness, you unconsciously know something has happened up ahead, and already have begun to slow down to avoid colliding with the car in front of you. Your situational awareness in this instance is an intuitional awareness of changing vehicle behaviors that if you were trying to think logically, you would end up in an argument with yourself. This is why driving is much more of a skill of situational awareness than attention to the road ahead. It is seeing the environment as something whole and complete, even without conscious awareness of it all.

Situational Awareness Example #2

You walk into a large room filled with people you do not know. Everyone is engaged in conversation. Your situational awareness in this instance concerns your purpose for being in this room. You are there to meet someone specific who you have never met and do not know what she looks like. You only know who this person is by her reputation within the industry that you work in. Even that reputation has more to do with her performance rather than her looks or personality. Your perception of her, even though partial, has a whole-knowledge character to it. You know your business well enough to understand that for someone to perform at her level, she has certain capabilities that other people will not have.

Something is going to distinguish her from the rest of the crowd. Your conscious mind is thinking attractive, well-dressed, and surrounded by admirers. You are thinking Star-power. However, none of that perception fits with what you see in the room. Then, you see over in the corner of the room a middle-aged woman, modestly dressed talking to a young man. She is listening to him as he is telling her something. Intuitively you realize that she is the woman you came to meet. You walk over, standing outside of hearing distance, being as unobtrusive as possible. As you wait for her to finish, you observe her as she is now speaking to the young man. The look of delight on this young man’s face tells you everything you need to know about this woman. They part. She turns to face you. She automatically knows who you are and that you came to this event to meet her. A list of her physical characteristics, or even simply a name tag, would not have prepared you to meet this person who understands how to engage people in meaningful conversation in a crowded room of people trying to impress their co-workers and competitors as to just how important they are.

How do you learn to be aware situationally?

It begins by not analyzing what you see. Stop looking for something. Stop trying to treat every situation as an opportunity to project your personality onto the situation. Simply observe without prejudice or judgment.

If you want to learn this skill, you have to stop interpreting every situation as having something to do with you. Treat the situation as if you are invisible. Just watch. What do you see? What do you see that you would expect to see? What do you see that seems odd and out of place?

Enter situations this way and patterns will begin to show themselves. Here is another example.

Situational Awareness Example #3

Over the past forty years, I have been in hundreds of business social events like the one described in Example #2 above. Two patterns show themselves. One is the gregarious salesperson who loves to talk about himself and his products. The other is the quiet, almost shy, business owner, who many people never even see at these events because they are hiding off in a corner of the room. They come to network, but they don’t know how to network. Their expertise is technical and process-oriented. It isn’t people-oriented.

In many of these groups, there is a person who is the coordinator or executive in charge of the program. They are managing the details of the meeting. They are also intent on meeting new people to recruit them into membership. Recently, I was attending one of these groups. The room had about 40 people in it. It was clear that almost everyone knew someone in the room. If you walked into the room late, you would see a lot of small groups of people talking.

The executive director of the organization that hosts these meetings called everyone to attention for some announcements and introductions. I happened to be standing next to her. So, I was observing how everyone was observing her. She had the people who were new introduce themselves. She then asked for ideas as to how to make the monthly meeting more valuable to people. This was my fourth meeting with this group. Each meeting had at least 60-70%, new people. Her appeal was about how to create consistency month-to-month. As I observed the room, I realized that no one was going to say anything. Everyone had been transformed from the gregarious business owner to a shy, stand-off-in-the-corner business owner. I stepped forward and said, '

“This is my fourth time here. There has been a lot of new people each time. It is important each of us take some responsibility for making these events worthwhile. To do so, we have to show up.

I want to incentivize the challenge to participate monthly.

Anyone who has an idea that can help make these meetings better tonight, I will give you a signed copy of my book, Circle of Impact!

Then I said, and next time, if you bring someone who has never been before, I’ll give both of you a signed copy of my book.”

Three people offered ideas, one person came up to me with his guest, and another purchased a book from me. I gave away four books and sold one more that night.

I did what I did because I have spent my life developing the skill of situational awareness. It is an observational skill that has changed my own self-perception. It requires emotional maturity. Not because you are going to stand up in a crowd of strangers and make a fool of yourself. You just have to be willing and capable to put aside your fears and desire for significance in order to see what the need is at that moment in time.

Situational Awareness is one way that we live a Synthetic life. It is whole and creative. It is born from self-awareness. A proper self-perception is an understanding of who we are that provides us a basis for being our true selves in any situation that we enter.

Synthetic Awareness

I want to encourage you to change your life. I don’t think you can do it by creating some grand plan. The solutions that come from meeting your goals require a mechanism for sustaining what you have created. Let me take you back to one of my first Substack posts, Start Right Now.

There I propose five steps that you take to change your life.

Educate Yourself

Simplify Your Life

Create a Purpose for Impact

Establish a Network of Relationships

Write to understand what you think and feel.

As I look at them now, they seem too logical, too mechanistic, and too abstract. Let me restate them as simple actions to take.

Observe people and the world to learn.

Say No more because you are clear about the Yes in your life.

Ask why more.

Listen to people more.

Write every day what you see and hear.

As you gain self-awareness and grow in situational awareness, write me at ed@edbrenegar.com and let me know what you are learning. By writing about this, I am learning. By listening to you, I learn. Let’s spend 2023 in this kind of learning mode.