The Biology of Becoming, Part X: Integration

Why Becoming Is a Cycle, Not a Ladder

For most of my life, I imagined time as a Microsoft Calendar, and I imagined growth as a ladder.

We are going to unpack the part about my mind and movement patterns being given to me by a PC for another day. For today, I want to explore the ladder.

With the ladder, you learned something, mastered it, moved up. You struggled, overcame, moved up: build the career, raise the children, accumulate the money, strengthen the body, acquire some wisdom and, presumably, keep ascending toward some more evolved version of yourself who had finally figured the whole thing out.

But I don’t believe that anymore. Now, I think becoming looks much more like a circular staircase.

Ever had that dejà vu feeling? That’s the recall I am talking about. We keep arriving at places that feel strangely familiar, confronting questions we could swear we have already answered, fears we thought we had conquered, ambitions we believed we had outgrown, only to discover that we are not actually standing in the same place at all. We are one level higher, looking at an old problem from a different elevation, carrying more scar tissue perhaps, but also more information. I absolutely love those moments, and I have started working very hard to pause and notice them.

Because when we do, if we’re lucky, we keep going around. And up.

Because biology doesn’t really work like a ladder either. The brain learns through prediction errors: it expects one thing, encounters another, and has to update its model of the world. We repeat patterns until experience gives us enough information to change them. Lessons become encoded not because somebody explained them beautifully to us, but because we lived them, sometimes painfully, until the knowledge moved from something we understood intellectually – I should not panic when markets correct – into something the nervous system finally believed – I never panic when markets correct.

Identity changes this way too. We don’t discard every person we used to be as we become the next one. The athlete, the parent, the artist, the entrepreneur, the frightened beginner, the person who failed spectacularly and the person who eventually figured something out all travel with us. Integration is what allows us to stop treating those previous selves as abandoned rooms and start using them as floors in the same building.

Which means the losses count too. Perhaps especially the losses.

What We Carry Around the Staircase

There is the most incredibly memorable moment near the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when the characters finally reach the Holy Grail. I have quoted this scene so many times I wish I could give myself royalties on it. They are surrounded by chalices, some ornate and glittering, others almost insultingly plain, and Walter Donovan chooses the magnificent golden cup because surely the cup belonging to the King of Kings must look like wealth and power.

He drinks from it, and he dies.

“He chose poorly,” the Grail Knight observes.

Indiana Jones looks again and chooses the humble cup of a carpenter.

“He chose wisely.”

It is such a simple scene, but I think about it increasingly as I get older, because one of the great privileges of accumulating experience is discovering how many beautiful chalices we once chose poorly. Status can look like success. Attention can look like importance. Consumption can look like wealth. Comfort can look like happiness, busyness can look like purpose, and certainty can look like wisdom – even and especially the A.I. kind of certainty, which I’m sorry ChatGPT, but you still make mistakes to conserve energy, and we all know it.

And sometimes we need to drink from a few of them before we understand the difference.

This is why I have become increasingly suspicious of the idea that wisdom means avoiding mistakes. Wisdom may be what happens when we become sufficiently skilled at using them.

In Plato’s Myth of Er, souls move through cycles of life, death and rebirth, witnessing the consequences of different lives before choosing another. Before returning, they drink from the River of Forgetfulness and lose the memory of what came before. Some of us call this the occasional “Friday night,” but for the most part, you get the point. So many times in the last few years as I have taken greater risks with my creativity, pushed my kids to grow and learn, and inevitably I, too, awaken for the 1am cortisol spike only to calm myself back to sleep with the knowledge that whatever happens, I will use what we learn.

There is something almost unbearably human about that idea because we do a version of it repeatedly within a single lifetime. We become someone, learn something, suffer something, change, and then, remarkably, forget enough of the lesson to find ourselves standing before another version of the same choice years later.

But perhaps integration is the practice of drinking a little less deeply from the river. What if maybe it’s about remembering, and arriving at the next turn carrying forward what the previous turn cost us to learn.

That changes the economics of struggle completely, because a loss that teaches you nothing is simply a loss, while a loss whose information travels forward becomes an asset.

The failed business teaches judgment. The broken relationship teaches discernment. The market crash teaches temperament. The injury teaches patience. And even the decade spent doing something you eventually decide you no longer want to do may still have taught you discipline, pattern recognition, empathy, craft or courage.

Nothing guarantees that suffering will make us wiser. Sometimes suffering simply makes us suffer. But integration is the thing that converts experience into usable knowledge, and usable knowledge compounds.

The Most Human Investment

I have come to think that we can occupy several different relationships with our own lives. I even made a piece of crude art about it in the summer of 2023 as a way of reminding myself to make sure that I choose which level I want to play. Let me explain.

• We can remain in the audience, consuming the lives and ideas and accomplishments of other people while becoming increasingly fluent in what everyone else is doing.
• We can become actors, stepping into the arena and beginning to participate.
• With enough repetition, we become performers, developing skill and competence and learning how to do difficult things reliably.
• But occasionally we move into something different altogether. We become the hero of our own particular story – not in the grandiose sense of being more important than anyone else, but in the ancient sense of the hero as the person willing to leave the familiar world, encounter difficulty, be changed by it, and return carrying something useful.

And then, maddeningly and beautifully, the staircase turns again, and we become beginners.

This may be one of the hardest transitions in modern life because we live inside an extraordinary machine for remaining an audience. We can watch other people build businesses, transform their bodies, make money, travel, fall in love, raise children, cook dinner and renovate houses for hours every day and experience just enough borrowed dopamine to confuse witnessing a life with living one. And here friends, the danger is not merely wasted time, it is arrested becoming.

Rumination can do something similar. So can regret, chronic comparison and the conviction that because one chapter went badly, the story has somehow stopped moving. The modern mind has an astonishing capacity to keep replaying experience without converting it into information.

Integration requires forward motion and the willingness to remain teachable. To return to beginner’s mind at 30, 50, 70 or 90, while bringing with us everything the previous versions of ourselves paid to learn. And that is why I can think of few investments more important right now than adaptability.

We are entering a period of technological, economic and biological change in which many of the assumptions that carried us through the first half of our lives may not carry us through the second. AI will change how we work, longevity may change how long we work and how many distinct lives we have time to live, and the old definitions of retirement, expertise, education and even human usefulness are already beginning to wobble.

The instinct will be to defend what we know, but the more advantageous opportunity is to integrate it.

To take the discipline from one life, the heartbreak from another, the skills from another, the wealth we managed to build, the mistakes that cost us some of it, the people we loved, the things we tried, the truths we eventually outgrew, and carry all of it around the staircase.

Because in the end, that may be the most human skill we possess: not avoiding struggle, and not merely surviving it, but taking what it teaches us and becoming something that could not have existed without it.

If we’re lucky, we get to keep going around. And up.