A Game Board for Life

Genuine conversations don’t happen on Zoom, Twitter, or Slack. Nor do they occur around a dinner table or across a desk.

Here’s what I mean: The location of our eyes, ears, and mouth is incidental compared with where our “head is at;” Our “head space” is where we have a meeting of the minds, not our GPS location. We all know this, and use spatial language like:

“He’s got his head in the clouds.”

“They can’t see the forest for the trees.”

“Let me speak from the heart.”

We complain: “I just can’t see where they’re coming from” or “How can you not see this?!”

But as the modern world shatters our shared worldviews, we increasingly “talk past each other,” fighting unwinnable battles over invisible turf.

There’s an order and chaos to everything: from our personal development, to a work project, to the arc of history. Likewise, relational and conceptual heart and mind spaces exist within our friend group, work team, and the culture at large.

The specific descriptions, scale, and players vary, but the patterns are the same. For this introductory visual guide, I’ll narrow the borders somewhat to worldviews — the various, often conflicting ways we see the world.

The companion essays explore each space in depth. Here, I share a brief fly-over of each of the six spaces as an orientation.

We enter Normland wherever there’s an “us” and “others” in view — as we step into a holiday gathering or scroll down a social feed. It’s the primary space of our church, club, or pub. Here, we “fit in” or get punished for “acting out.” We’re “in sync,” “vibing” with, or are “disconnected” — all feelings that move us to act before we name them as feelings like shame, desire, loneliness, or belonging. We don't require a rulebook where we can blush or a financial incentive to act right where we might attract a mate. We instinctively dance along or face the music.

Tour Normland

Conservatism, fundamentalism, nationalism, patriotism, fandom, puritanism, literalism, authoritarianism, fascism, moralism, traditionalism, royalty, patriarchy/matriarchy, folk, family values, religion, collectivism, Luddism, Christian Nationalism, MAGA, populism,…

A social order creates stability, but also a volatile social hierarchy that may quickly spiral into unchecked power, witch hunts, and tribal wars when not rooted by less personal conceptual order. Then, we enter:

Systemland is an escape from the drama and excess of Normland above the surface. We extract patterns from our dramatic, fickle, and dangerous experiences into impersonal and timeless abstractions. These conceptual patterns patch the holes in our social fabric — instead of a skin-to-skin battle, we can refer to an agnostic rule, scientific fact, or a formula that works the same today as it will 10,000 years from now.

Tour Systemland

1Rationalism, libertarianism, stoicism, nominalism, intellectualism, systematic theology, modernism, empiricism, capitalism, meritocracy, skepticism, technocracy, secularism, materialism, behaviorism, utilitarianism,...

While eternally in tension, a robust relational and conceptual order is the foundation of society and where we spend most of our lives and thoughts. But no matter how right, correct, or robust, it must evolve or it will devolve into a destructive and fragile tyranny. We evolve the order of our lives when we step towards Chaos:

Here we find new, incomplete social patterns: Bleeding-edge causes, spiritual practices, revolutionary movements, art forms, memes, and other expressions of social progress. It’s a dramatic, artful mess of experimental ways of relating beyond what's permitted by the tradition or mainstream pop culture of Normland. As an emergent space, the patterns here are a broad-brushed, mixed bag of social impulses, most of which will never come to pass; but a few just might change everything for the better.

Tour Cultureland

2Punk rock, anarchism, marxism, (new) progressivism, critical theory, collectivism, social justice, Antifa, moral relativism, humanism, postmodernism,...

Here we find emerging and unproven theories and technologies that seek to replace or expand our existing technology, laws, and accepted knowledge. The half-baked ideas here are a messy mix of brash, naive, and brilliant — and there's no telling which is what in the short term.

Tour Innovationland

3Effective altruism, silicon-valley-tech-optimism, systems thinking, heterodoxy, metamodernism, simulation theory, transhumanism, singularity theory, …

This galaxy view reveals cosmic-level relational patterns. The people and cultural patterns of the past, present, and future collapse into a grand but incoherent vision. It sounds like "crazy talk" — vague, divergent, and strange expressions that only the most galaxy-brained can follow. Most never even see — let alone enter this space — although we may roll our eyes at it from a distance. The encounters here aren't materially real, yet they feel more real than any possible experience from our five senses.

Tour Visionland

There’s no consistent worldview here, only visions of a promised land or existential doom.

In our final corner, we grasp for intuitions that justify a meaning for everything, all at once, for all time. What explains the randomness and order? The pain and suffering from moving chaos to order over generations? Is there an underlying order other than what we create (or is that the wrong question altogether)? What's the fundamental formula that might unfold everything in a universe?

Here, we find no coherent worldviews—only deep intuitions of ultimate purpose that may be timeless insights or fantasies of a disordered imagination.

Our team, project, or community functions best when we have a healthy mix of order and chaos — a balanced map. In order to accomplish this, everyone involved must respect the psychological place of themselves and others. The first step is to be more fully aware of what’s in each space.

The companion essays zoom into each space and explore more of the characteristics, plays, and players. I’d welcome your thoughts.