I feel like I only wrote half that comment. Here’s the rest.
That kind of compartmentalization is not something that comes naturally to people without systems in place to push them to it. In a traditional society, there’s just sort of one social sphere (attempts at secret groups for ritual purposes notwithstanding) that overlaps with everything and you can bring your whole self all the time everywhere and people will expect you to do that. It’s only that we ask more of people in our modern world because compartmentalization works well as a bridge to help people at stage 3 get by in a world that expects them to be at stage 4 or higher: it keeps complex social interactions functioning when the people involved would otherwise interact in ways that would eventually, compounded over many interactions, tear modern society apart.
I think much of the difficulty and dissatisfaction people find in the modern world comes from some critical mass of people developing to Kegan 5, reshaping society, and then tearing apart some of the things that helped people bridge into the Kegan 4 level and modern society. To go back to professionalism, lots of aspects of traditional professionalism have broken down. For the people this works for they really enjoy the more casual atmosphere, but it makes it harder for people who are at Kegan 3 to fully join the party because it requires stepping out into a groundless space that’s difficult to navigate without solid frames provided to them. For all the stifling of traditional notions of professionalism, it at least created an equal ground with known rules that made it easier for people to come up into. I think we underappreciate how difficult the erosion of these norms makes it for people who are at Kegan 3.
And I want to importantly emphasize that we need to make a world that’s accessible to folks at Kegan 3, because this is the natural developmental level for most adult humans. So, in fact, I’d say, to use your metaphor, we’re asking people to LARP in a situation where the rules are vague and you don’t necessarily understand why the DM (or whatever this is called in LARPing) punished you, or even necessarily the genre of LARP you’re doing. We used to have clearer rules, we cleared them away because the people who stopped LARPing and starting living in game (out of game?) full time thought it would be more fun that way, and it is for them, but not for everyone else.
I feel like I only wrote half that comment. Here’s the rest.
That kind of compartmentalization is not something that comes naturally to people without systems in place to push them to it. In a traditional society, there’s just sort of one social sphere (attempts at secret groups for ritual purposes notwithstanding) that overlaps with everything and you can bring your whole self all the time everywhere and people will expect you to do that. It’s only that we ask more of people in our modern world because compartmentalization works well as a bridge to help people at stage 3 get by in a world that expects them to be at stage 4 or higher: it keeps complex social interactions functioning when the people involved would otherwise interact in ways that would eventually, compounded over many interactions, tear modern society apart.
I think much of the difficulty and dissatisfaction people find in the modern world comes from some critical mass of people developing to Kegan 5, reshaping society, and then tearing apart some of the things that helped people bridge into the Kegan 4 level and modern society. To go back to professionalism, lots of aspects of traditional professionalism have broken down. For the people this works for they really enjoy the more casual atmosphere, but it makes it harder for people who are at Kegan 3 to fully join the party because it requires stepping out into a groundless space that’s difficult to navigate without solid frames provided to them. For all the stifling of traditional notions of professionalism, it at least created an equal ground with known rules that made it easier for people to come up into. I think we underappreciate how difficult the erosion of these norms makes it for people who are at Kegan 3.
And I want to importantly emphasize that we need to make a world that’s accessible to folks at Kegan 3, because this is the natural developmental level for most adult humans. So, in fact, I’d say, to use your metaphor, we’re asking people to LARP in a situation where the rules are vague and you don’t necessarily understand why the DM (or whatever this is called in LARPing) punished you, or even necessarily the genre of LARP you’re doing. We used to have clearer rules, we cleared them away because the people who stopped LARPing and starting living in game (out of game?) full time thought it would be more fun that way, and it is for them, but not for everyone else.