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Life Development
This page is used for curating ideas about Life Development. I use the following keywords:
Wikipedia > Adult Development
Other Wikipedia items:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Other items
Quora
Google Images / Diagrams
Google Scholar > Life Course
The Culture Demands of Our Minds
Robert Kegan (1994)
In 1994, the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan published a book titled .
In Over Our Heads focuses on the fit or lack of fit between what the culture demands of our minds and our mental capacity to meet these demands. According to Robert Kegan,
The psychological phenomenon is the evolution of consciousness, the personal unfolding of ways of organizing experience that are not simply replaced as we grow but subsumed into more complex systems of mind…The cultural phenomenon is the ‘hidden curriculum,’ the idea that to the list of artifacts and arrangements a culture creates and the social sciences study we should add the claims or demands the culture makes on the minds of its constituents. (1994, p.9)
Kegan’s “psychological — cultural” dialogue approach is the seed of my ideas about three types of freedoms. See the diagram below.
I developed the above diagram for the Life Discovery Toolkit on Jan 23, 2022.
I use three dimensions of the concept of “Life” to develop the above model. There are at least three ways to understand the concept of “Life”.
These three perspectives can be called Biological Life, Sociocultural Life, and Spiritual Life. I also defined three types of Freedom.
Why did I choose “Freedom” as a core concept for this idea? On Jan 1, 2022, I designed and used “Degrees of Freedom” as its primary theme. I learned the term from the Japanese strategy consultant .
However, “Degrees of Freedom” is a traditional term of strategic thinking in the context of business competitions. For individual life development, I don’t consider competition as the first thing.
This model leads to a challenge: What’s Freedom? My rough answer is the following diagram. I use a simple formula to define “Freedom”. The pair of concepts of “Supply — Demand” is inspired by economics.
It’s clear that I want to expand the “psychological — cultural” dialogue to the “psychological — biological” dialogue and the “cultural — biological” dialogue.
The above diagram is my intuitive idea about the model which leads to a slogan: Being by Doing.
It looks like this is a dialogue between Humanistic Psychology and Activity Theory.
If a person wants to offer values to satisfy others’ demands, he or she should keep a good order for internal equilibrium in order to maintain the supply system.
Life Discovery: The “Being by Doing” Principle
The Starting Point of the Life Discovery Toolkit
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