The gist of the core wound for my type (3w4) is “the grief of disconnection.”

Hearing that for the first time hit home: a name to a haze that periodically set over my life, marked by an empty, confusing, inner gnawing.

But more deeply, it is the inner belief that performing, succeeding, being the best at whatever, achieving, tuning in and doing and being what I think others want, is the way to connection and love.

The insidious loop here is that letting go of that doing is what feels like death because it will feel to the ego like a loss of connection. The paradox is that the ego manufacturing what it believes is going to get it what it wants… guarantees that we don’t actually get it. The way out is feeling into the emptiness of this grief.

And as I navigate this inner journey, I wonder if there is a collective journey in the bodies around me in San Francisco during this cultural moment:

this moment of acceleration and the anticipated proliferation of agentic products that will usher in a new era of human tools.

A moment that feels so precipitous to all of us in the weeds.

And perhaps there is a foundation of loneliness from covid, from the normalization of staying at home, from the public spaces that have become so devoid of random encounters, that is still coloring our days.

I don’t understand these waves of feelings - that to be honest I was only able to unblock myself enough to feel a few years ago - but naming it makes it more ingestible.

I have great hope in this moment, in the promise of AI to augment the human experience, to make us feel more alive in the time that we have. But I wonder if to get there, we need more discourse on the grief of disconnection to build a future of more presence, acceptance, being, peace, and connection.