I first encountered this thought as a young teenager reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. In her fascinating tale which I recently re-read, she contrasts two fictional societies – one very much like ours and another described as an ambiguous utopia.

In the world that mirrors our own, citizens are concerned with possession and the striving toward increased wealth in order to purchase more things. Class hierarchies, competitiveness, and power struggles are the norm of everyday life. Most poignant and central is the belief that happiness comes from externals such as possessions, stature, and health.

In the utopian world, inhabitants are focused not on ownership, but by how they relate to others and what they can do for them. In fact, there is no ownership. Everything is shared. “All you have is what you are, and what you give.” In this, they are free.

When we own things, attachment naturally follows. Pronouns like “mine” and “yours” frame our possessive communications, and in some cases we go to great lengths to “protect” what is “ours”. Homeowners and parents know this very well. Continue reading →

When I worked in corporate America I found myself in many networking meetings. And often the first question someone would ask was this: What do you do?

We’ve become so accustomed to equating people with their roles.

And it isn’t just an external association. We do it to ourselves.

Just ask someone to describe themselves and you’ll soon hear the labels they’ve self-ascribed to their persona. I’m a customer service rep. I’m a stay-at-home mom. I’m an engineering manager. I’m a sales rep. I’m a nurse. I’m a single parent. I’m retired. I’m unemployed but currently looking.

That’s who we are. Or at least that’s who we say (and likely believe) we are. Continue reading →

When I was growing up, I was friends with twin sisters. They were identical twins, meaning one egg was fertilized which then divided into two separate embryos.

Of course, the girls looked exactly alike, and anyone who knows identical twins, or is one, relates to this – I often got them mixed up.

I came to discover that many identical twins have a deep understanding of their sibling, knowing exactly what the other is thinking while easily finishing one another’s sentences.

Many stories of identical twin “coincidences” have been documented, perhaps none more astonishing than what University of Minnesota researcher Thomas Bouchard discovered when he studied two Ohio boys separated at birth. The identical twins were adopted by different families, and unknown to each other were both given the first name James. Both boys grew up loving and hating the same subjects, followed the same career path, bought the same type of car, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, and both married women named Linda. Both were divorced and remarried – each to a woman named Betty. The two men finally met after 39 years of being separated – all the while never knowing their twinship. Continue reading →

How much pain would willingly inflict on another person, particularly if that person was screaming out in agony?

Think about your answer, then consider this horrifying experiment.

A researcher tells two volunteer participants that he is conducting a study on memory and learning. One volunteer will be assigned the role of teacher and the other the role of learner. The volunteers randomly draw slips of paper to determine who will be in which role.

However, one of the volunteers is actually an actor who is in on the experiment with the researcher. The two slips of paper both read teacher but the confederate claims to have drawn the slip that reads learner.

The learner is then strapped into a chair with electrodes from a high-power machine Continue reading →

Pop quiz: what’s the largest living organism in the world?

The blue whale comes to mind, which is a very large animal indeed. But the largest living organism is the Pando tree colony in Utah. It weighs over 13 million pounds and is approximately 80,000 years old.

Within the Pando tree colony about 50,000 trees occupy over one hundred acres of land. While each tree seemingly stands alone, the entire sprawl sprouted from – and shares – one massive root system.

It is easy to believe that each tree stands alone as its own independent structure – each soaking up the sun, synthesizing sugars, and sprouting leaves. Yet just beneath the surface is the tie that binds each of the seemingly 50,000 unique trees into a unified whole. It is one massive entity. Continue reading →