The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Parent and the Pendulum | Frankly 95

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

In a culture driven by achievement, autonomy, and digital distraction, our sense of identity is often shaped by performance and external validation. Yet beneath this surface, many carry unseen psychological imprints from childhood and culture alike. What happens when we begin to examine these layers and imagine healthier ones? In this week's Frankly, Nate explores the themes of attention, awareness, and the psychological impacts of modern life. Through poetry and reflection, he examines the pull toward validation and control that shapes many of our behaviors. Building on the Ideal Parent Figure Protocol developed by Dr. Daniel P. Brown, he expands the concept to explore what ideal cultural and ecological figures might offer in addressing our deeper collective needs. What are the qualities of a healthy culture -- one rooted in belonging, continuity, and shared purpose? How can we reconnect with ecological kinship and wisdom? And finally, where is your branch of stillness, the one place the pendulum of this world doesn't reach? (Recorded May 12, 2025)   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie. ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners

Greetings. Every week, I have great intentions for the following weeks, biophysical macro, frankly. And then I get an idea based on this Friday's, frankly, on something new. Last Friday, I talked about attention and awareness and how important that is in our lives. and I realized in my own life there's a few people I have 100% awareness and attention to. Often that way with my ducks and my dogs and in nature. But increasingly, this year since January or so, especially early in the morning, 5.36 in the morning, I play music from YouTube, Philip Glass or Brian Eno or something. kind of ambient or trans like, and I write poetry.

I write about animals. I write about people that I know. I actually was biking with a friend this weekend. I was doing impromptu haikus on my bike ride. But yesterday morning, I wrote a poem about a friend of mine. I think all of us know the one or two traits of each individual we know, that kind of speaks to them. Like my golden retriever Murphy,

she compulsively has to carry one or two or three things when she comes up to meet you, and she chases squirrels. Those are her things. This friend of mine has an intense need for social approval and to be liked, and she has an intense avoidance of being pinned down or having commitments, and she requires complete control over her own schedule and surroundings.

And she knows this, of course. She's just a wonderful, wonderful human being, but she has this baggage. And we all have baggage, and that's in a roundabout way. I'm going to come to the relevance to the Great Simplification. But I'm going to start by reading this poem I wrote. I haven't shared it with her or anyone yet. It's called the pendulum. In her childhood home, achievement hung like portraits on the wall.

Each test score, blue ribbon, gold star, a monument to a yang vision. Higher was the prompt while she stood on tiptoe, reaching for stars she couldn't name or even see. Approval became her currency. She learned to perform and sparkle in the right light, collecting admirers like souvenirs. never staying long enough for the shine to dull. And when hands offered to guide her, something primal would rear within, a wild horse refusing the bridle,

running headlong into empty planes. The forcing function from the father, long after childhood end, still pulls her like a phantom leash, an imprint she answers to when no one calls. Between these poles, swung, the hungry ghosts need for validation and the fierce rejection of control, back and forth, exhausting years.

Until one summer morning, Gray Hayes filtering through her window, she watched a sparrow return to the same branch again and again and again. She recognized then the distinction between a cage and a nest, that freedom isn't constant flight, but choosing where to land. The pendulum now slows, not from a father's grace, nor by the pull of others' expectations, but by her own breath, deepening, claiming a branch of stillness that was always hers. So as I finished that, that took me about an hour with like 100 edits. I realize there are multiple layers here. And one of the layers is this was a little bit about me as well. I am not as high on the amplitude dial as she is on these traits, but this rhymes

with me. And then I realized this rhymes with a lot of people in our modern supernormal stimuli, fossil carbon pulse infused, just in time, convenience, comfort, wealth and status, amplitude, culture that we have. Humans have always sought and strived for status. In our ancestral times, it was intelligence or kindness or storytelling or hunting, but now the accordion of wealth and status distribution is really high. So people in order to differentiate themselves, try to get likes and approval and such. And because of the smorgasbord of activities that the carbon pulse allows us,

we also like to control our schedules and we don't like to be constrained and don't like to have rules. So in many ways, the poem I just read applies to many of us, most of us, in this culture. And so I wrote a closing, stanza that goes consistent with the theme of this podcast using a wider boundary framing. Look closer at the swinging weight. This pendulum moves not just in her story, but mine and yours

and ours. We oscillate between the need to be seen and the yearning to be authentic, checking notifications while longing for silence, building careers while forward forest thin. The pendulum ticks in every chest until we notice what remains and rediscover our branch in the web of life. So I lose myself in writing these poems, but there is a truth here that the pendulum, both of our parents, and much broader than that, even our culture and our tether to the natural world affects our psychology and our mood and our temperament and our daily behaviors. And I think always, of course, parents have some imprinting like a duck on their children. And sometimes the pendulum can swing the entire life.

And I just recently experienced something at a Mahamudra retreat that I'd like to share with you and build on. It's something developed by the late Dan Brown, the psychologist and Mahamundra coach, not the author, called the ideal parenting figure protocol. And it's a visualization where you imagine, not your parents, but hypothetical, the kind of parents that every child needs,

and you close your eyes and you imagine this. And it's based on five core needs. safety. So knowing you're protected, free to explore, and able to return to your parents for reassurance. Being seen. This means having your inner world noticed and accepted by your parents without judgment. Comfort. So this is being soothed during distress and learning calm from the nervous system co-regulating with your parents. Delight. Being valued, looking at your parents and seeing that they delight in what you're doing and being cherished for simply being you.

And lastly, be encouraged to take risks, make mistakes, and become yourself, not become who they want you to be. And if you visualize these things, it actually can heal some of the traumas that we carry with us in this culture from our parents. and many people have severe traumas, some have moderate, some have mild. It's very few us that have none. So even just imagining this kind of care starts to heal old gaps and creates emotional

scaffolding. But what if, and here's the point of this, frankly, what if we extended this idea beyond our parents to our culture? What if we imagine an ideal cultural representation that our culture lacks? So as an ideal parent provides psychological safety, perhaps an ideal cultural backdrop, which we lack in this anomaly of times during the upslope of the carbon pulse, provides narrative safety, a shared context of who we are, what matters, and how to live. Here's some speculative cultural themes that modern societies are missing that might have been

found in cultures of the olden days and the ancient days. One is belonging, a deep sense that I am part of something larger that's grounded in place, story, and mutual obligation. Yes, conventional religions have that. Economic growth had that for a little bit, no longer. But we're missing the sense of belonging. Second category might be continuity, intergenerational memory and mythos, a felt connection to ancestors, elders, as well as future beings. Ritual and maybe rhythm, like collective practices that mark the passage of time, celebrate life stages, grieve losses, and affirm values. And I'm not talking about Halloween or Black Friday or the Fourth of July. I'm talking about something deeper there.

And finally, shared purpose, kind of a coherent cultural North Star, what we're here to do and how we honor limits together and wisdom. embedded wisdom, like practical, ecological, moral knowledge that's passed on orally through custom and not optimized for clicks. So maybe there's a visualization of the ideal cultural protocol that we don't have. I don't know. I've never tried it. But then that got me to thinking, We are very disconnected from the ecological interconnectedness of our ancestors. It's well known in the literature that access to green spaces reduces our cortisol, boost our immune system, improves our mood, etc.

So what if there was an ideal ecological tether protocol? What did our ancestors have access to that we currently, in this money and technology, are all culture, don't? First might be attunement, the ability to notice the species that live on our land and the weeds and the flowers and the birds and the insects and the seasonal patterns and the plant cycles and the weather shift being censorily alive to our land. our place. Kinship, I've talked a lot about that on this show, an understanding that non-human life, and there are up to 10 million other species than humans on this planet, has intrinsic value, and that we are relatives, not rulers. We have nieces and nephews and cousins in nature that followed a similar life path on the evolutionary tree of life. Also might be stewardship, acting as guardians of our ecological inheritance, not owners or extractors.

Gratitude, a reverent awareness that all energy and nourishment and ecosystem functions that we get mostly for free is gifted by the web of life. And as you're aware, not included in the prices or values of our current cultural system. And lastly, constraint the wisdom to say, enough and to live within the caring capacity of one's land base. So from a poem to ideal parent protocol, to ideal cultural protocol, to ideal ecological tether protocol, these are my thoughts today. I'll leave you with a couple of questions.

What thoughts did you have when I read that poem? what is your branch where when you're there, the pendulum in our world or in your life doesn't reach you? And lastly, what type of protocol grounds you in these times? Much more to say. Hope you're all well. I will talk to you next week.