Why I Can't Write This Post, and Why That IS the Post

I've been trying to write this for a while now. Months, actually. And I keep getting stuck. Not for lack of material — I have the opposite problem. Every time I sit down to put this together, the same thing happens: I see too many angles, too many entry points, too many audiences I could aim at, and I freeze. I want to express all of it at once and I know from decades of hard experience that overwhelming people with a firehose of information just makes their eyes glaze over. That's exactly why my RPG research books had to be broken up into 50+ separate volumes — because what makes sense as one integrated thing inside my head turns out to be an impenetrable wall of information for anyone approaching it from just one direction.

And then it hit me that the thing preventing me from writing this is the exact thing I'm trying to describe.

That's the whole thesis. Right there. Stick with me and I'll unpack it.

Aka, The Other 1 Percent Problem

References this: https://www.hawkes-haven.com/blog/1-percent

On my other blog post here on the site, "1 Percent 'joke'", I laid out the statistical outlier nature of my physical and cognitive life — the height (peaked at 6' 8 and 3/4 inches at 300 lbs, now several major injuries and illnesses later, mid-50s at 6'7" and 300 pounds, 99.952nd percentile), the IQ testing history, the income swings from homeless to briefly top 1% and various points between, all of it. Numbers. Measurable stuff. What I didn't get into was the relational consequence of being that statistically unusual across that many dimensions simultaneously. Not just tall. Not just highly variable and at times high-IQ. Not just any one thing. All of it, stacked together, in the same person, while also being a person whose life experiences have cut across so many different worlds that most people can barely track the list, let alone relate to it.

This post is about that other consequence. The social one. The one that's harder to measure and harder to explain, but in many ways costs more than any of the others.

"Dude, You Just Got Your A@# Kicked"

I need to tell this story because it illustrates the core problem better than anything else I can think of, even though on the surface it seems like it's about something completely different. Kind of the way "Fight Club" isn't about the fight club.

The setting: Salt Lake County Jail, sometime in the early 1990s. I was getting out the next morning. I'd been in jail six times by that point (it was the last), and I knew the kangaroo court rules: if you get in a fight, no matter who starts it, that's an automatic 30 additional days. I was hours from walking out.

A heroin addict going through withdrawal, on day 9 of withdrawal, decided he needed to prove himself to the cell block. The way you do that is by taking on the biggest guy everyone else is afraid to mess with. That was me, at 6'8" and change at the time, with martial arts training going back to age 4 in San Francisco — kung fu, karate, judo, t'ai chi, and aikido, pushed hard by my father.

By my late teens, my height, my reach, and my speed meant I could block essentially anyone's attack. I'd been in somewhere north of a hundred fights from age 6 through 23 — school, streets, jail, wherever. I never threw the first punch, and I tried to walk away, but sometimes my temper made me stay longer than I should, though as I grew, I would increasingly become someone people did not casually decide to take a swing at. I was in third grade holding my own against sixth graders, and in 4th grade against 8th graders, and in 6th grade against adults. But this guy was strung out, desperate, and had something to prove.

Here's where it gets interesting.

For years before this, I had been meditating on an idea. In aikido, you learn to redirect your attacker's energy — you don't resist it, you use their energy against them and/or guide it past you. But I kept wondering: why does it have to stop at physical redirection? Why couldn't I just... let the energy pass through me entirely? Not block, not redirect, not resist at all. Be water. Be a ragdoll. A leaf in the wind. Let the attacks happen and simply not be a rigid target for them to impact against.

I'd never had a chance to test this where the stakes were right. In most of my previous fights, not fighting back would have gotten me seriously hurt or killed. This guy was a 17+ years (40-something year old) prison revolving door lifer, tatted up, only maybe 5'10", but "Popeye arms" and prison biceps, and prison ripped, but was a withdrawing addict that I felt sorry for, and I really didn't want to hurt him, and most importantly I had the perfect motivation to not fight: if he had a mark on him, it would be 30 more days if I threw a single punch.

So when he came at me, I didn't put up my hands. I didn't adopt any guard position. I just stood there, instead of tensing up, I relaxed as much as I could, and when his blows came, I let my body go completely soft. Not limp-collapse-to-the-floor soft — I stayed on my feet — but every muscle relaxed. When his fist connected, instead of hitting a rigid structure that would absorb and concentrate the force, it hit something that just... moved with it. Gave way. Didn't fight back on any level, not even the involuntary muscular resistance that most people can't turn off.

He tore my shirt pretty badly. He jumped up (to me somewhat comically) to take a few blows to my head (from JourneyQuest I'm reminded of: "Have you had many blows to your head?" "Hundreds... Why?" :) ) — He swung himself out. When he stopped, red-faced, shaking from withdrawal, adrenaline, exertion, and panting heavily, I was still standing there, completely calm.

"Are you finished yet?"

He called me a name and stormed off, exhausted and unsatisfied.

I went over to the metal mirror near my bunk to assess the damage. I figured I'd see red marks, cuts, fat lip, swelling ear, the beginning of welts, something. I usually don't feel pain until hours later — possibly a redhead/Viking genetics thing, possibly just how my nervous system has always worked — so I knew I might look worse than I felt.

I looked. And my shirt was shredded, but my skin was fine. No redness. No marks. Nothing.

I turned to the nearest inmate, grinning. "It worked!"

He stared at me. "Dude, you just got your ass kicked."

I figured the bruises would show up overnight. I went to sleep.

Nothing the next morning either. Not a single mark anywhere on my body.

I tried to explain. I pointed out the complete absence of any marks. Nothing. He didn't get it. Couldn't get it. Didn't have the framework to process what he'd just witnessed.

I slept better than I had slept the whole time I'd been in jail (on guard).

During the night while I slept, they crept in and stole all my "commissary".

The next morning the guards yelled "Robinson! Roll up!" and I was out.

It was my sixth time in jail, and my last.

22 years old, somewhere north of a hundred fights, and my last one too.

I walked out with no bruises, no marks, smiling while everyone else scowled.

I usually find at this point I need to clarify. What I did in that cell wasn't magic. It wasn't spiritual. It wasn't mystical martial arts movie nonsense. It was physical. Physics. Biological. Biomechanical.

There's a well-documented phenomenon that gets discussed in emergency medicine and trauma research: intoxicated people in car crashes often survive impacts that kill sober passengers. For a long time people assumed this was just folk wisdom, but research out of the University of Illinois at Chicago and elsewhere has confirmed a real effect. Friedman (2012) analyzed data from over 190,000 trauma patients treated at Illinois trauma centers between 1995 and 2009, finding a strong inverse dose-response relationship between blood alcohol concentration and in-hospital mortality — at the highest levels of intoxication, mortality rates were reduced by nearly 50 percent, even after controlling for injury severity. His follow-up study (Friedman, 2014) examined the specific medical complications affected, finding significant reductions in cardiac and renal complications attributable to blood alcohol concentration, providing clues to the physiological mechanisms involved.

Part of this protective effect has to do with alcohol's impact on the body's inflammatory and shock response post-injury — as Friedman put it, "You don't die from the injury itself, you die from the subsequent physiological response" (as cited in Pappas, 2012). But the other part — the part most relevant to what happened in that jail cell — is about muscle tension at the moment of impact. Sober people instinctively brace. They grip the wheel, tense their muscles, go rigid. This actually concentrates the force of impact into specific structures. When the body fights against the momentum generated by impact, the force becomes more concentrated because there is less distance and time over which deceleration occurs. A relaxed body distributes force across tissue more evenly, reducing the peak stress at any single point. The energy dissipates rather than concentrating. The human body has viscoelastic tissues that absorb energy and protect vital organs from impact effects — as long as the energy delivered stays below the injury threshold, whether that's the crush limit, the viscous limit, or the acceleration limit, the energy is absorbed without causing injury (Committee on Trauma Research, 1985).

That's the principle. I took it further through deliberate practice — years of meditation and martial arts cross-training — but the underlying physics is straightforward and well-understood. There's nothing supernatural about it.

The problem is: who do I explain that to?

The martial artist might get the aikido redirection concept but probably hasn't spent years meditating on extending it to pure non-resistance. The meditation practitioner might understand the internal work but has zero context for what it means to actually stand there while someone is swinging at you. A physicist would appreciate the energy dynamics and tissue mechanics but would have no reason to connect that to a jail cell fight. My "blue collar" buddies, despite the stereotypes, only a few who've been in their share of scraps would understand the fight context but would look at me sideways the moment I started talking about meditation and biomechanical force distribution. My academic colleagues would want to see the experimental protocol and p-values (sample size: n=1, in a jail cell, good luck getting that past IRB review).

Nobody has enough adjacent frames of reference to see the whole picture at once.

And that — right there — is the whole problem, applied to one specific experience. Now multiply it across my entire life.

Leading With the Wrong Hand

There's a physical version of this that started before I was old enough to have any say in it.

I was born left-handed. My father was left-handed. It's how my brain is wired. But my mother, with the best of intentions, insisted on raising me right-handed because in the 1970s and 80s, being left-handed in American schools was still a genuine disadvantage. The desks were wrong, the scissors were wrong, the notebooks were wrong, and the word "sinister" literally comes from the Latin for "left." She was trying to make my life easier.

So I learned to do most things right-handed. Except that when I teach myself something on my own, without someone standing over me correcting my grip, I often default back to left. My brain still reaches for the left hand first. I'm functionally ambidextrous in the sense that I can use either hand for most tasks, but my handwriting is equally terrible with both — which has less to do with which hand I'm using and more to do with dysgraphia, a neurological condition that makes the physical act of writing a cognitive war. My conceptual abilities are strong, but dyscalculia impairs my math processing, and the standard remediation for dyscalculia is "write it out step by step," which runs directly into the dysgraphia wall. Throw in extreme ADHD and CPTSD and you've got a neurological obstacle course that made traditional school an exercise in being punished for how my brain works.

The nuns at Saint Ann School in Utah would whack my hands for my terrible writing. When my right hand cramped from the dysgraphia — which happened constantly, usually after just 5 minutes of writing or so — and I'd switch to my left hand for relief, that earned its own correction. Wrong hand. Wrong writing. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I'm not bringing this up for sympathy about learning disabilities. I'm bringing it up because it's the earliest and most literal version of the pattern I'm describing in this entire post: being naturally wired one way, but forced to present as another to fit the world's expectations. Leading with the "correct" hand instead of my actual hand. Showing the "right" facet. Rotating which side of myself faces outward depending on what the environment will tolerate.

The difference is, with handedness, I eventually just learned to use both and moved on. With everything else — the social facets, the political positions, the cross-domain thinking — there is no "just learn to use both and move on." The mismatch is permanent and the adaptation never stops.

The Polyhedral Problem

I'm going to use multiple metaphors here, deliberately, and I'll tell you why.

If I were talking to my gaming friends (I'm known as "The Grandfather of Therapeutic Gaming" for a reason — I founded RPG Research which has served over 100,000 people across six continents using tabletop role-playing games as therapeutic intervention), I'd describe myself as a polyhedral die. Not a d6 — that's too few faces. Something more like a d20, d30, or maybe one of those ridiculous d100 Zocchihedrons. Lots of facets. Any given person I interact with can see one facet, maybe two or three if they stand close enough and tilt their head. But they never see all the facets at once. Nobody does. The die is always showing just one number to any given observer.

If I were talking to a more scientific intellectual, or academic audience (and I want to be clear here — "intellectual" and "academic" are not automatically the same group, even though they, and many others, often assume they are), I might try to use the prism metaphor. White light contains all wavelengths. A prism separates them so you can see each color individually. I'm walking around projecting individual colors depending on which angle you're viewing from, but nobody sees the white light. They see red or blue or green and they think that IS me. It's a genuine piece of me. Nothing phony. But it is nowhere near all of me.

For my mechanic friends, my miner friends, or my fellow motorcyclists from the street racing days — people who live in the physical world - I know a lot of different kinds of people, but none of my people know each other, and when they meet, they usually can't stand each other.

All three metaphors describe the same phenomenon. I just have to pick which one based on who I'm talking to (know your audience). And the fact that I have to pick — that I have to rotate which facet is showing out of consideration to them — is itself the problem.

I want to be very clear about something here: this is not mask-wearing. This is not being a social chameleon, not being fake, not putting on different personas for different audiences. I am usually very intensely, sometimes uncomfortably, present in every interaction.

Every facet is genuinely me.

The martial artist is me.

The programmer who's been coding since 1979 is me.

The therapist (Recreational Therapist since 2004, and Washington State Registered practitioner since 2014, including founding RPG Therapeutics LLC) is me.

The ground crew, heavy construction, mining, lumber, surveying worker, that's me.

The professional photographer who shot for 7 of Utah's 8 (at the time) top modeling agencies as a primary photographer, and worked graveyards at Kodak processing film and prints, while working on-call armed security guard who had to use physical force and discharged my weapon (legally) in shootouts, and had multiple drive-by on my apartment, waking up with bullet holes in my bed's headboard, having to move apartments several times per year, all me.

The Habilitation therapist helping profoundly impaired individuals get up in the morning to go to PT/RT/OT at Hillcrest Care Center, certified nurses aide and LPN trainee at Doxie Hatch who often worked the "death floor" consoling them while they lived and clean them up when they died and was the whistleblower that got five nurses fired for leaving patients in restraints all night long (burned by their own fecal matter by the time I came on shift) and then ostracized when the others found out I was the one that reported them, and who was also a Bodywise Fitness nutrition salesman, and worked as a cashier at a gas station, or later at 7-11 driving of thieves and gangs, me.

The kid who was in a hundred-plus fights with a hair-trigger-temper, but never threw the first punch, that was homeless and lived on the streets a handful of times, and went to jail six times, is me.

The father of three wonderful boys, whom I adore totally, and feel blessed to have been a full-time single parent to focus on raising them as best I could, and failed in many ways, but is so grateful for them, is me.

The musician (Synthetic Zen) is me.

I am the person that brought 12 "risky" people together in a quarantine jail cell to play Middle-earth Role-playing during a week-long lock-down after black and hispanic gang members stabbed each other. I GM'd a group all at the same table of 2 black gang members, and 2 hispanic gang members (both from the same involved gangs though not directly involved in the prior stabbing), 2 Vietnamese gang members, 2 white supremacists with tattoos on their faces, a Navajo nicknamed "Chief", and handful of other inmates, all getting along, setting aside all their differences, while 20 other inmates watched and listened getting through a particularly difficult time, the only cell without incidents during that week. And I was one of the inmates too. That was me.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Information Technology Officer (CTO), is me.

The RPG researcher is me.

The guy who can strip an engine and the guy who can discuss Tolkien's legendarium in exhausting detail and the guy who ran street races in muscle cars and trucks I "souped up" myself, or on a motorcycle fleeing from a dozen police across 5 jurisdictions in a single night and across 4 states for 2 years, and the guy who reads cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience papers for fun — all me, all present, all the time.

The adaptation isn't about becoming someone different.

It's about which parts of myself I can make legible to the person in front of me. The rest doesn't go away. It's just invisible to them.

The Social Network Nobody Else Can See

So here's the pattern that has repeated itself across my entire adult life, and increasingly so as I've gotten older.

I have friends. I've always had at least a few, sometimes more. I can connect with an extremely wide range of people across an extremely wide range of demographics, backgrounds, and interests. In groups, I'm often the person everyone gets along with, while simultaneously annoying/alienating others. When I choose to, I can fairly easily be the one who can move between different clusters at the party, the one who has something to talk about with just about anyone, or actively listen very supportively (though that sometimes varies with how manic or ADHD I am at that moment too).

Sounds great, right?

Here's what it looks like from the inside:

My mechanic friends can't stand my literary friends.

My literary friends look down on my mechanic friends.

My little brother literally said "how did you even meet or associate with these people?"

My gaming friends think my "jock" friends are meatheads.

My jock friends think my gaming friends are basement-dwelling weirdos.

My academic friends can't relate to my blue-collar friends.

My blue-collar friends think my academic friends are out-of-touch elitists (some are though :) ).

My deeply Christian friends and my Seattle liberal friends (all good, kind people I genuinely like being around) exist in completely different universes and would probably spontaneously combust if forced into the same room. Especially nowadays.

The list goes on. At length. Ad nauseam.

I'm the only node that connects these networks. In my role as CITO translating between business and tech people, and in my personal life.

In social network analysis terms — a field developed by sociologists like Mark Granovetter and Ronald Burt — I occupy what Burt calls a "structural hole." I'm a bridge between otherwise disconnected clusters.

This is often part of why I create new clusters that didn't exist for me where I was at the time (spokane2600.org, spokaneasl.com, maladnet.com, tolkienmoot.org, tolkienscholars.org, manicmechanic.com (1990s), rpgresearch.com, northfivemile.com, and the 399 domains I own).

Burt's research, beginning with Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (1992) and elaborated in subsequent work (Burt, 2000; 2004), shows that this bridging position gives the broker access to diverse, non-redundant information flows and can create competitive advantage in business contexts. As Burt (2004) summarized: "Opinion and behaviour are more homogeneous within than between groups, so people connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving." Granovetter's foundational "strength of weak ties" work (1973) describes how bridging connections between tight-knit groups are the channels through which truly novel information travels — strong ties within dense clusters tend to circulate the same information, while weak ties that bridge between clusters carry new ideas.

What neither of them spent much time on is what it costs the bridge. Burt (2000) acknowledges that brokerage is "the more difficult strategy" and that bridge relations between groups decay faster than relations within groups, but the emotional and social toll on the individual occupying that position — the lived experience of being the connector that none of your contacts can relate to as a whole person — doesn't figure much into the structural equations.

Because from the outside, my social life looks rich and varied — all these different worlds I move through.

From the inside, the experience is something different. Every connection is partial. I can share one or two facets with each person. Sometimes three, if I'm lucky. But I've never — not once, in 55 years — found a person or a group where I could bring most of my facets into the room at the same time and have them recognized.

I am a strong supporter of the vision of the melting pot I saw growing wonderful benefits, until around 2010 or so when it rapidly accelerated in decline, and I am adamantly against Balkanization, and its growing US and global trend.

This pattern maps onto broader trends. McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears (2006) found that Americans' core discussion networks — the people with whom they discuss important matters — shrank by roughly a third between 1985 and 2004, and the number of people reporting no one to confide in nearly tripled. The networks that remain have become more kin-centered and less diverse.

If even typical Americans are losing the breadth and depth of their social connections, someone whose connections span as many non-overlapping worlds as mine starts from an already precarious position.

I thought I found it during the dot-com boom. I went to Silicon Valley and for a brief moment thought maybe I'd found "my people."

That area and group of people at that time in the tech world was closer (definitely isn't anymore!) — these were multi-faceted creative and smart people who built things, who thought in systems, who got excited about possibilities.

But as CTO, there was an executive distance that creates its own isolation. And when I watched the insane "burn rate" competitions — companies proudly bragging about how fast they were blowing through investor money — my fiscal conservatism put me at odds with the dominant culture all over again. (And that same insane burn rate mentality is now happening all over again in AI, for what it's worth.)

Close. But not close enough.

The Political Orphan

The friend-group incompatibility problem becomes especially sharp in the political dimension. And I know writing about politics in a personal blog post is guaranteed to annoy somebody, but this is too central to the experience I'm describing to leave out.

I have not met a single person in my life with whom I significantly resonate politically. Not my ex-wife (ultra-conservative Mormon — I was never Mormon). Not my current wife (Seattle liberal, though she's uncomfortable with how Marxist some of her friends have become — she's more in the mold of her parents' 1960s liberalism than the hard left of today). Not friends. Not colleagues. Not acquaintances. Nobody.

This isn't because my views are extreme (though anyone not matching one of the facets would immediately declare me as so, and usually contradicting the others for the other facets). If anything, they're the opposite — they just don't cluster along the axis that everyone else seems to use.

I'm fiscally very conservative. I'm environmentally center-right. Socially, prior to the ESG/DEI era that's bent the scale so far it's hard to even locate myself on it anymore, I would have been considered considerably left of center. I'm pro-choice but prefer small government. I'm non-religious and entirely live-and-let-live about it, but I'm not one of those zealot atheists who've turned disbelief into its own religion. I'm intensely anti-fascist AND intensely anti-Marxist and I know the actual historical and philosophical differences between them (which puts me at odds with both groups, who each like to pretend the other is the only form of authoritarianism). I am pro "ethical capitalism" but not "crapitalism". I'm anti-authoritarian in all its forms — left, right, corporate, governmental — but I'm not an anarchist libertarian. I believe in the rule of law, as long as the laws are applied equally to all and haven't spiraled out of control (they have). I prefer small government but I don't believe in no government.

This is all internally consistent. It's essentially a classical liberal position with some pragmatic conservatism — the kind of political stance that was relatively more unremarkable 30 or 40 years ago. But it doesn't map onto any currently existing tribe. There's no party for it. There's no subreddit for it. There's no cable news channel for it (I listen/watch/read NPR, Fox News, CNN, Democracy Now, PRI, BBC, Glenn Beck, Thom Hartmann, Coast-to-Coast, Hearts of Space, Bloomberg, MSNBC, radio shows, podcasts, streams, etc.). Both sides hear a small part of what I think, and then they assume I'm on the other team.

I have deeply Christian friends and family whose character and kindness I respect enormously, but I often can't follow them where their religion directs their politics. I have progressive friends who share many of my social values, but I can't follow them into the collectivist framework they're increasingly adopting. I watch both groups get captured by their respective extremes and I find myself standing in a middle ground that's shrinking by the year.

This is actually happening in a measurable, documented way. This is older data - I need to see if I can find anything reliable for the more intense past 10 years since - the Pew Research Center's landmark study on political polarization (2014), based on a survey of over 10,000 adults, found that the share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions doubled over the preceding two decades, from 10% to 21%. Partisan antipathy surged alongside it — the share of Republicans holding very unfavorable views of Democrats jumped from 17% to 43%, while Democrats' very unfavorable views of Republicans rose from 16% to 38%. Meanwhile, the center shrank: the proportion of Americans holding a roughly equal mix of liberal and conservative positions dropped from 49% in 1994 to 39% in 2014 (Pew Research Center, 2014). And those in the ideological middle are less likely to vote, donate, or participate in politics (though often I do all three in various forms), meaning the most polarized voices dominate the process while the center goes unrepresented. The trends have only intensified in the decade since.

As the center shrinks, the activity groups and social spaces where politically diverse people used to coexist are getting captured, one by one, by one extreme or the other. I've watched it happen to hobby groups, professional organizations, community groups, online forums — spaces I used to be comfortable in, taken over by people who demand ideological conformity as the price of membership. I have to regularly rein in people on both sides at RPG Research because I want to keep it the truly accepting environment of everyone that it has been for over 40 years, and I will to my dying days keep working hard to keep that a place where Christians, Atheists, Pagans, Democrats, Republicans, and everyone else, as long as they follow the Code of Conduct, can all feel safe to drop the baloney, and take a little time to have fun and grow in the process. It is notable that the Code of Conduct I reference, was half a page from the 1970s through the 1990s. In the early 2000s I had to grow it to a full page because what once was understood as "common sense" was slipping in community social recreational settings. And by the 2010s and 2020s I had to grow it to the now 8+ page document it sadly had to become!

There are fewer and fewer rooms where someone like me can walk in with all my facets showing and not have at least half the room decide I'm the enemy.

The Energy Tax

People sometimes tell me I should be grateful I can get along with everyone. And they're not wrong, exactly. It is a genuine ability and it has genuine value. But they're describing the benefit without acknowledging the cost.

The cost is this: being partially known everywhere and fully known nowhere is exhausting.

Too often, if people are around me for a while, they comment sooner or later "What haven't you done!?". I had an employer, when I was Maintenance and Security Manager at Villa Franche Apartments (100+ apartments), buy me that "BEEN THERE" "DONE THAT" shirt they wanted me to wear for work as a good-natured joke. Because everything they needed me to work on, I had experience doing it (and I was only about 23 years old then). I usually respond with: Barely been able to leave the country (government complications with my identity), never jumped out of a perfectly good plane (my wife has!), never been in the military, haven't achieved my life's dream to make it into outer space. :) But it isn't about braggadocio, though I make light of it. There is a lot going on here.

Every interaction requires a rapid assessment of which facets to bring forward and which are going to be overwhelming, alienating, or just invisible. This is not about being dishonest - I'm not being dishonest - but because leading with the wrong facet means the entire interaction goes sideways before it starts. If I open with the jail stories in an academic or professional context, I'm dismissed (or even fired by HR, even with full up-front disclosure during hiring to the interviewers and hiring managers, for charges not convictions because HR decided they can't have a VP in a publicly traded company even mention the past 10-20+ years ago that had nothing to do with the company or position, and not even any convictions, just dropped charges).

If I open with the neuroscience research in what many would cliché as blue-collar contexts, eyes glaze.

If I open with the martial arts meditation insights basically anywhere, people either think I'm making it up or they file me under "violent" or "weird" and move on.

And the thing I WANT — the thing that drives the frustration behind this post — is for people to understand. Not just one facet. The whole picture. How it all fits together. How the martial arts and the meditation and the biomechanics and the street fights and the jail time and the programming career and the therapeutic recreation practice and the neuroscience studies and the gaming research and the sports, and outdoorsmanship and wilderness survivalism, and the travel, and muscle cars, and the glider pilot flying and the photography and the music and the political philosophy are not separate random interests bolted onto the same person. They're one integrated understanding that manifests differently depending on which domain I'm applying it in.

I WANT to unpack it all. I want to take the time. It's the same impulse that leads to my reputation in professional speaking and training programs for very interesting, highly useful "learning more in 6 weeks part-time, than in 6 months full-time anywhere else", but nonetheless as "overwhelming firehoses of information."

I see the connections between everything and I want others to see them too. And when they do - this is why I love teaching, but why entrenched academia and I don't always connect consistently - I LOVE to see the light come on in their eyes (every teacher knows what I'm talking about), they are having a life-altering-paradigm-shifting-never-see-the-world-the-same-way-ever-again-and-better-and-happier-for-it-and-raises-them-and-the-world-up-and-further-lights-up-the-world-a-little-more-with-another-lit-taper (Jefferson, 1813).

But it takes so much time and energy to unpack even one cross-domain connection like that run-on-hyphenated-sentence-above (or like the jail fight story) that doing it for every facet, for every person, is simply not possible within the constraints of a human lifespan and my all too often 120-hour work weeks.

The Meta-Problem

And so we come back to where we started, with me unable to write this post.

Because I wanted to write this for my gaming friends, using the polyhedral die metaphor. And for my academic colleagues, using the prism analogy and the social network research. And for my "regular Joe" friends, keeping it real and grounded. And for the politically homeless moderates who might recognize themselves. And for the polymaths and multipotentialites (Frederickson et al., 1972; Wapnick, 2015) who know exactly what I'm talking about because they live it too, scattered across all the same non-overlapping spaces I am.

I wanted to write it for all of them at once. And I couldn't. Because the problem I was trying to describe — the inability to show all facets simultaneously to a single audience — was the thing preventing me from writing about it.

So I wrote it like this instead. Many of the facets. Many of the metaphors. Many of the audiences at once.

Maybe it's too long. Maybe it's a firehose. Maybe different parts will resonate with different people and the rest will feel like noise.

But if you're out there — if you're the person who doesn't just TLDR, can retain large context, who holds together a network of friends who can't stand each other, who has a political position that doesn't fit any party, who synthesizes ideas across domains nobody else connects, who is fully yourself everywhere but only partially visible to anyone — I want you to know the experience has a shape. You're not imagining it. It's real, and it's documented (the social network research confirms the structural reality, even if no one talks about the emotional cost), and you're not the only one living it.

You're probably just the only one in your particular set of rooms. Which is, of course, exactly the problem.

— Hawke Robinson, February 22nd, 2026 www.hawkes-haven.com

This is part of an ongoing reflection related to my "1 Percent 'joke'" post on this site. I expect to expand on various sections here as time permits — including but not limited to the biomechanics of the non-resistance principle, the social network research on brokerage costs, and the political polarization data. For now, I wanted to get the shape of it down before another 120-hour work week stole the moment. Now back to work (now February 23rd, 12:54 am, working another all-nighter, but I needed this mental tangent for a bit).

References

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Burt, R. S. (2004). Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110(2), 349–399. https://doi.org/10.1086/421787

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Jefferson, T. (1813, August 13). Letter to Isaac McPherson. In A. A. Lipscomb & A. E. Bergh (Eds.), The writings of Thomas Jefferson (Vol. 13, pp. 326–338). Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0322

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Brashears, M. E. (2006). Social isolation in America: Changes in core discussion networks over two decades. American Sociological Review, 71(3), 353–375. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240607100301

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Pew Research Center. (2014, June 12). Political polarization in the American public: How increasing ideological uniformity and partisan antipathy affect politics, compromise and everyday life. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/

Wapnick, E. (2015, April). Why some of us don't have one true calling [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_calling