Grokkist Newsletter #73

Hey friends,

Last time, I wrote about hyper-responsibility and it seemed to strike a chord. Thank you to everyone who wrote back—it’s always nice to know the echo came back with something in it.

This time, I want to pick at something that’s been itching for years.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” – T S Eliot

A lot of grokkists—myself very much included—don’t actually know how to be helped.

Instead, we offer help as a kind of belonging chip.

And the thing we offer to help with nine times out of ten turns out to be exactly the thing we most need help with ourselves. We just… haven’t realised it yet.

Through a narrative therapy lens, the “not knowing how to be helped” isn’t a flaw—it’s a survival adaptation. Many people’s stories have taught us that receiving help comes with strings, judgment, or loss of agency.

So we learn to control the narrative by flipping roles: becoming the helper, the fixer, the resource.

That role feels safe, admirable, and self-determining. But it also means we end up circling the thing we most need without ever touching it directly.

It’s also a way of regulating ourselves. Direct help can feel too exposing, like holding eye contact for one beat too long. So we sidle up instead and:

• Help others with the thing we secretly need.
• Join spaces where help is floating around, but never take the direct hit.
• Apprentice into roles where the receiving is built into the doing.

For many grokkists, help only becomes bearable when it’s framed as contribution.

We can metabolise it if it’s wrapped in purpose, reciprocity, and skill-building—but not if it’s simply given for our own sake.

That’s why so much of Grokkist is scaffolded to deliver reality sideways, with the careful misdirection of a nurse talking about your weekend while the needle goes in. It’s all structured so the people most resistant to receiving help can get exactly what they need, in a way that preserves their dignity and agency.

We enlist, we invite, we build exchanges—so that reality comes in doses small enough to bear, but potent enough to transform.

This is the kind of psychologically elaborate, slightly delulu scaffolding required to help certain people—our people.

You can see this spirit in action with the new Affinity Groups we’re rolling out—micro-communities where grokkists gather around shared questions and practices, creating spaces where help flows naturally because it’s embedded in shared work and curiosity.

When I started Grokkist, I was burned out and a bit battle-damaged, so of course I went off and immediately built a whole thing about Helping People (🙈).

Only somewhere along the way did I realise the real work isn’t “helping people” at all—it’s setting up the kind of spaces where help sneaks in sideways, feels good to receive, and actually sticks.

And yes—before you ask—I’m still learning how to let that happen for me, too.

With curiosity and care,
Danu

Fresh and Featured Pressings

For Everyone Whose Mind Can’t Settle

By Jessica Böhme (7 min read)

While some may fear a lack of certainty, a life without questions can be just as unsettling.

Read the article ↗

An Ode to Those Done with Religion

By Jim Palmer (25 min read)

How do we find our way through the loss of everything we thought we knew?

Read the article ↗

More from the Press

• A da Vinci coda - process versus results (Peter Gilderdale, 5 min read) – When our curiosity gets in the way of results, we can draw inspiration from one of history's greatest scatterbrains.
• Multi-tasking for Dummies (Peter Gilderdale, 3 min read) – When our best laid plans go awry, can we learn to trust the process?

Upcoming Events

🟢 Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Narrative Participatory Inquiry

🗓️ Mon 18 Aug | 1pm–2.30pm EDT (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Kyle Godbey

Join us for a guided introduction to narrative sense-making—a participatory method for uncovering shared meaning through stories.

In this interactive Grok Talk, Kyle Godbey will walk us through a technique he’s spent years synthesising: one that blends ethnographic storytelling with structured data collection to illuminate how communities understand themselves.

Used in organisational settings, research, and social change contexts, narrative sense-making offers a way to hold multiple perspectives, surface hidden patterns, and invite group-level insight without collapsing nuance.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

🟢 Grokkist Art Party

🗓️ Thur 21 Aug | 4pm–5.30pm PDT (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Sarjé Haynes

Let’s make art together in real time — and use it to do some redecoration of our shared virtual space!

This event sprung from our recent group discussion about AI Art, including a nuanced appraisal of the use we make of it here on the Grokkist Network. One of the ideas that arose there was to collectively spruce the space as a gesture of communal creativity. We have so many visual artists in this community — and that means we have an opportunity to make the space truly look like ours, and to truly feel like a virtual home.

So bring your paintbrushes, pencils, digital tools and dynamic creative conceptions to this Grokkist Art Party, where we’ll be co-creating new banners and other graphic elements to adorn and beautify our shared space.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

Other Upcoming Events

• 15 Aug | 🟣 Grokkist Members Meetup [Aug '25]
• 26 Aug | 🟢 Grok Cafe [#6 in 2025]
• 28 Aug | 🟢 Feeling into Ren Xue: Pulling Qi, Finding Centre
• 1 Sep | 🟢 Grokkist Writing Salon – September 2025
• 11 Sep | 🟠 Future Self Now: Meet the You Who Knows

#1 - Status, class, and the crisis of expertise

Status, class, and the crisis of expertise

By celebrating “common sense” over expert authority, populism performs a dramatic status inversion. It gifts uneducated voters the power of knowledge and deflates those who look down on them.

Conspicuous CognitionDan Williams

Dismissing populists as “stupid” misses the point. What’s at play in the rejection of "expert authority" is often less about facts and more about pride, status, and the refusal to be talked down to. It’s a performance of dignity. Many people reject expert guidance not because they think it's wrong, but because accepting it feels like conceding status to a condescending class.

“You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition. As long as the acceptance of expert guidance is experienced as an admission of social inferiority, there will be a lucrative market for demagogues and bullshitters who produce more status-affirming narratives.”

Drawing on Dostoevsky, anthropology, and modern politics, the author frames this as “epistemic charity”—knowledge given from on high—which can feel less like help and more like humiliation. “The scientist, academic and fact-checker do not expect to learn anything from ordinary voters.” In other words, the elite knowledge-producing class tends to suffer from a systemic failure of curiosity. Repairing trust in expertise may have less to do with better evidence, and more to do with how it’s offered—and received.

#2 - Slow Light – a man who can only see the past

Stop-motion short film about a man whose eyes perceive reality only seven years after it unfolds. In Slow Light, time becomes a prison—memory bleeding into the present, leaving him forever behind. The film’s poignant line, “In a world where light travels too slow, the truth always comes too late,” captures that vertigo of missed moments. A meditation on how regret can freeze us one frame behind the life we’re actually living.

#3 - At Crufts

Rosa Lyster · At Crufts

Here, in an arena where the Sugababes recently performed, is a crowd bursting into applause as a spaniel steadfastly…

London Review of BooksRosa Lyster

Crufts is a four-day migration of 24,000 dogs into a Birmingham conference centre, where the stakes are low (£200 for Best in Show) but the commitment is absolute. The author captures the strangeness and splendour of this world—Samoyeds in hotel lifts, Afghan hounds at late-night parties, and a zebra crossing halted by a wall of St Bernards. It’s an ecosystem of devotion, competition, and unabashed love—where strangers greet each other with “What’s your breed?” and the reasons for choosing one champion over another are as mysterious as the dogs are magnificent.

#4 - Synesthesia Suite – seeing through someone else's ears

Synesthesia—where the senses mingle—comes in many forms: tasting words, feeling textures from sounds, or, as in composer Mary Bichner’s case, seeing colours when hearing music (The Synesthesia Tree has a good map of them all). In Synesthesia Suite, she invites the rest of us into that experience. Working with scientists, visual designers, and the Charles Hayden Planetarium, Bichner maps each musical key to its corresponding hue in her mind, then synchronises the live score with a dome of shifting, radiant visuals.

The finale performance brings it all together: a string quartet bathed in matching LED light, planetary imagery gliding overhead, colors and chords blooming in precise harmony. If you’re curious to see how others have explored this territory, check out Kine-Tech’s interactive synesthesia project for a different, playful take on translating sound into sight.

#5 - Duck Relativity – a matter of perspective

A minute-long duck toy duet about being big or small drifts into a list of things that can’t be measured—kindness, courage, curiosity, patience, resilience, generosity. With simple rhymes, warm harmonies, and a duck called Paul, it feels like stumbling across a lost fragment of childhood TV, the kind that sneaks past your guard and leaves you a little misty-eyed. (🙏 Richard B)

Membership Benefits

As a Grokkist Member, you’re part of a circle of active grokkists walking the grokkist path. Here’s what membership includes:

• 🟣 Member-Only Gatherings
• 🧩 Three Self-Guided Courses (Red Thread, Ecosophy, ADHD Meditation)
• 🍲 One ‘Quick Win’ Session per Year
• 🛠 Ongoing Groksmithing Project Support at Member Rates
• 📚 Free eBooks from Grokkist Press
• ❤️‍🔥 30% Discount on Courses and Ticketed Events
• 🎭 Featured Member Profile
• 📣 Post Calls, Invitations, and Events
• ✨ Early Access to Pilots and Prototypes
• ▶️ Events Recording Library
• ⭐️ Digital Member Badge

👉 Your membership also helps fund the operating costs of Grokkist and supports community-led projects and initiatives.

Become a Grokkist Member - $75/yr

A pair of parting thoughts...

“People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.” ― Lemony Snicket

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson