Around 10, I started having a recurring nightmare.

I don’t know if it a false memory, but I recall waking up in my baby sister’s room. It’s the middle of the day. I start yelling for my dad.

He isn’t in the house.

Memories resurface. My parents divorced. Dad hasn’t been here for awhile now.

Even before Dad left, I don’t remember feeling his care. He was distracted.

The benefit was I didn’t feel pressured to be anything I didn’t want to be.

The cost was I did not have a living example of what I ought be.

Luckily, I read a lot. My first hero was Harry Houdini. I remember doing a project on him in 3rd grade. I was fascinated by his obsession for learning ‘impossible’ tricks. He collected other magician’s tricks and taught himself how to do them.

My next idol was Leonardo Da Vinci. His notebook, the range of his curiosity, and the scope of his mastery possessed me for years.

I was looking for what a son needs from a father. I was looking for a model; an example I could follow.

I’m 34 now. In some way, I’ve never stopped looking for mentors with models.

Because I have questions I want answers to.

What does it look like to be a good Father in 2025?

What does it mean to be a true adult in 2025?

What ought I build for the next 7 generations?

Freud is attributed quipping that a boy who’s mother truly loves him, thinks himself fit to rule the world.

I don’t do as much cocaine as Freud, so I don’t want to rule the world, but I do think I can affect it. I believe I can help improve it. And that requires the kind of audacity Freud was speaking to.

There is a special kind of audacity that grows in the child that knows unconditional love. My mother gave me this gift, and I’m willing to admit it has revealed itself as arrogance far more often then audacity throughout my life, but it is this flame in me that compels me to contemplate the above questions.

Because the twin ghosts ‘if not me, then who?’ and ‘if not now, when?’ gently haunt me.

Men and women who lived the kind of lives history writes about, great people, these people’s stories helped raise me. Their mosaic was the face of my composite Father. Because of them, I can admit I want to become like them. I want to live the kind of life that can help raise the future.

First, for my children.

What does it look like to be a good Father in 2025?

But I also want to be a leader, a protector, a provider, and a way-maker. Hence the second question.

What does it mean to be a true adult in 2025?

And lastly, I want to be a part of a people capable of creating multi-generational projects. I want to see what the 21st century cathedrals look like. I want to be a good ancestor.

What ought I build for the next 7 generations?

To these ends, I have hunted maps and models all my life.

The one I share next is my favorite.

When I first learned it, I laughed and cried. At times, I stood up from the book and exclaimed to the walls and my surprised roommates.

It changed my life and continues to change the lives of those I share it with.

It’s author’s name is Bill Plotkin, and he is dangerous.

A Map To True Adulthood

This is the face of one of the most dangerous men alive.

His name is Bill Plotkin and he was a student of Jungian psychoanalysis.

Carl Jung was a visionary; and if he were alive today, he would not be a Jungian.

Jung was a line crosser. He’d find the edges in psychology and jump over them.

Bill Plotkin, like Jung, is a visionary. He went to the edges of Jung’s world and took it further.

In his 20s, Plotkin found himself in a Jungian analyst’s office. He was dying inside. He credits his Jungian analyst with saving his life. He committed himself to the study of depth psychology, eventually earning a PhD and working within the mainstream.

But through a series of synchronicities, he stepped outside the fluorescent-lit temples of modern psychology and went wild.

Plotkin is, in a way, what Jung would have become if he had grown up in the Americas and had apprenticed with the indigenous elders.

Bill Plotkin’s magnum opus is the map of soul development he created.

This is the most potent developmental map of the human being I’ve encountered in 13+ years of research.

It’s worth breaking down and moving through slowly.

There are 8 stages of human development:

1. Early Childhood
2. Middle Childhood
3. Early Adolescence
4. Late Adolescence
5. Early Adulthood
6. Late Adulthood
7. Early Elderhood
8. Late Elderhood

We will focus on stages 3, 4, and 5 for now.

1. Early Adolescence
2. Late Adolescence
3. Early Adulthood

One of the first striking parts of Plotkin’s map is that it is not age that marks the transition between stages. We move from one stage to the next after completing specific tasks.

This means people can get stuck at younger stages for decades.

In Plotkin’s eyes, the single greatest cause of our culture’s death spiral is that most of the ‘adults’ in our world are stuck in early adolescence (including you and I, sorry).

For the power of this model to land, I’m going to change the names of the three stages we’re going to look at.

Early Adolescence → The Gamer

Late Adolescence → The Descender

Early Adulthood → The True Adult

Stage 3, Early Adolescence, begins in childhood, when our friends become more interesting than our family. By high school, this stage is in full swing.

According to Plotkin, almost everyone you know, personally and through our black mirrors, are still at stage 3.

Most of us are stuck at Stage 3 (and we love to tell ourselves we aren’t).

This stage is about finding our place in the social order. We’re calling this stage The Gamer because the point of this stage is to learn how to play the social games. The point of this stage is to learn how to win these games.

This stage is about power, sex, and status.

To pretend we never wanted to win these games is a lie.

Many of us are stuck in stage 3 because we repress our desire for power, sex, and status.

We spiritually bypass.

Rather, we do MDMA every few months to keep our broken relationship together. We think a cacao ceremony will wash away the hours we spend daily judging everyone we see on our phone. We hide our browser histories, and we’d rather complain about the corruption of the government then face the corruption in our own families.

Our mistake is thinking we can skip these ego games because we’ve listened to Alan Watts and Ram Dass.

The grace of developmental psychology is it reveals that we have seasons of life. Each season has unique quests.

According to Plotkin, the task of Stage 3 is complete when our 'life's wishlist' is complete.

If this lands, it will change you.

To graduate Stage 3, you have to complete your adolescent wish-list.

To put it simply, to complete level 3, you’ll likely need to ‘win’ one or more of the following games:

1. learn how to make enough money to no longer worry about money
2. learn how to eat, train, and sleep to no longer worry about your physical attractiveness
3. win enough status games so that you no longer chase stranger’s approval
4. learn how to play interpersonal games so you can maintain and grow long-term relationships

Naval Ravikant has a great quote:

If you want to unstuck your Stage 3 development — actually compete. Win the game to be free from the game. Achieve your ‘life wishlist.’

The function of Stage 3 is to build a strong, adaptive Ego.

Because you’ll need that strong ego for Stage 4 — The Descent into Soul.

Stage 4 is what we’ve come to call ‘the mid-life crisis;’ but the term midlife crisis is a porcelain prosthetic Spielberg used for Jaws. The Descent into Soul is finding yourself adrift at sea, blood leaking from under your suit, and seeing a large mass in the distance coming towards you.

Descent into Soul, Stage 4, is the most challenging thing we each go through, it takes years, and the vehicle you take into the Descent is the ego you developed in Stage 3.

This is worth repeating.

Our Descent into Soul will be the hardest thing we will ever go through.

Not because tragedy won’t visit us after we complete this stage, but because, after stage 4 completes, our psyche changes. We will never again approach life as a separate ego who has to win to protect itself. The completion of stage 4 reveals Soul as the main character. Ego becomes the emissary of Soul. This changes everything. Never again will you feel alone.

This fundamental reconfiguration of the Psyche produces the True Adult.

We’ll talk about Stage 4 more later, but for now we’re going to focus on this True Adult thing.

Known as ‘Early Adulthood,’ Stage 5 is when our Ego has given the inner throne to Soul, and what emerges is what Bill Plotkin calls The True Adult.

Plotkin believes there are almost no True Adults leading our culture (less than 5%).

And it is Plotkin’s definition of what a True Adult is that won my heart.

I’m known amongst my friends and students as setting a pretty ambitious standard for what it means to be an adult in our world.

However, when I read Plotkin’s ‘Journey Into Soul Initiation’ the first time, I laughed until tears leaked from my eyes.

His definition of a True Adult is the most inspiring and audacious model for what it means to be an adult I have found in 13 years of research.

This deserves slow digesting.

Let’s go through this quote point by point.

0.

The first glimmer to notice is what he is implying. This ‘True Adult’ is a birthright for all of us. No class, creed, sex or IQ is excluded. It is all of our responsibility.

1.

True Adults know why they were born.

Boy, feel into that for a moment. Do you know why you were born? Most hours of most days I forget. But I do know what this gnosis tastes like. It means having a personal living mythology that grows out of your chest, composting reality around you, turning all pain and glory into soil, flowers, and fruit.

The first mark of a True Adult is they walk with Dharma.

2.

True Adults know who they are as unique individual participants in the web of life.

Here is what many misunderstand; your ego is not the enemy. Your ego is literally the medium through which your Soul gets to express in Spacetime. If you skipped stage 3 like I did, and tried to jump straight to Ram Dass and Alan Watts, your underdeveloped ego will get injured when it meets your Soul. We’ve got names for this like psychosis, but its main symptom is that you’ll lose your personal taste. You won’t know what to do because there is so much suffering in the world. You won’t know what to do because you could do anything! You won’t have strong opinions because it’s all subjective man. The reason stage 3 comes before stage 4 is because you will need a robust ego to survive contact with your soul.

The second mark of a True Adult is their unique personal taste survived encountering your soul. They are still unique individuals, but they understand they are intertwined with all of life.

3.

True Adults creatively occupy their distinctive ecological niche as a life-enhancing gift to their people and the greater earth community.

To put this bluntly, a True Adult knows their calling. They have designed their life such that their dharma imbues their work. Their profession has become a vocation. The competence they honed winning Stage 3 games is now harnessed towards service. They serve others in such a way that it feeds both the people they help directly, and the larger Earth community.

The third mark of a True Adult is they have created a vocation that feeds them, their family, the people they serve, and the larger Earth community.

But our boy Plotkin doesn’t stop there. He goes one step further.

“The True Adult becomes a Visionary Artist of Cultural Renaissance.”

This blew me away when I first read it.

As a boy without a father who gave me an example to stretch myself to meet, Plotkin’s map is the most inspiring challenge I have ever read in my life.

He believes that each of are meant to grow into visionary artists that herald a cultural renaissance. That is just a part of what it means to be a True Adult.

I’m brought to tears even now as I type this, the same way I was when I first learned this.

What an audacious love letter to humanity, to tell all of us that he believes we are meant to be visionary contributors to the cultural renaissance.

Why We Get Stuck

Most of us are orphans.

Few of us have met a true Elder. Our culture is terrified of death, and we’d rather inject plastic in our face and cut through our cheeks then make an exalted place for elders. Without a wild living wisdom tradition, we have to initiate ourselves.

And the vine we trip over is shame.

We either won’t admit that we want the wealth, power, sex, and status

or

We’re unwilling to face that our current strategies to win these games aren’t working.

Regardless of which reason, the result is the same. We look away because of shame.

The harrowing realization is that Stage 3 can’t complete itself until you’ve made it to ‘the top of the mountain’.

Jung’s Stage 4 didn’t begin until after

• he become a world-renowned doctor (status)
• married into one of the richest families in Switzerland (money)
• became Heir Apparent to Freud (power)
• and started an affair with one of his most gifted students (sex)

Instead of learning to play these Stage 3 games, we get stuck.

And the hallmark of getting stuck at Stage 3 if you’re always going through ‘death portals,’ every few weeks or months you’re going through another ‘dark night of the soul,’ or you’d rather research Antartica or the Moon Landings instead of pursuing your dreams.

Plotkin makes a distinction that haunts me (and that I love).

Plotkin writes that humans are like caterpillars (we know this metaphor). But what most people don’t know (at least I didn’t), was that caterpillars molt many times in their life, but they undergo Metamorphosis only once.

Here is a good way to tell if it’s been Molting or Metamorphosis:

if you have had multiple dark nights of the soul, you haven’t started your Descent.

Moltings are multiple. Metamorphosis is singular.

This is Molting:

​

This is Metamorphosis:

​

Understanding the difference between moltings and metamorphosis is adult curriculum.

Stage 4 is not a dark night. It is years. Plotkin says that most people he works with mistakenly think they have completed stage 4. He says the quickest he has ever seen someone move through stage 4 is two years, but that most people will navigate stage 4 for four to six years.

How can you tell if you’ve gone through your Soul Initiation?

Ask yourself, do I act like a True Adult?

If you do, then you have completed your metamorphosis.

If you don’t, you haven’t (and thats okay, it means your task is to complete your stage 3 games)

You’re not a True Adult if you don’t know who you are and why you’re here.

You’re not a True Adult if you aren’t pursuing mastery at a skill that helps others.

You’re not a True Adult if you’re unwilling to put your skills to work, for your community and the world.

You’re not a True Adult if the main character of your life is your personal ego.

None of us are True Adults yet.

I told you Plotkin was a dangerous man.

If you’re getting triggered, it means this is landing. It means an alchemical reaction is starting. According to Plotkin, most people on the planet are soundly asleep repeating the revolving moltings of stage 3.

The task is to develop a powerful, competent ego by winning your Stage 3 games.

Each of us has a unique ‘wish list’ that our hormone crazed adolescent self fantasized about. For most of us, it will take some work to uncover what our unique list truly is. Below are some of the main categories the wishlist pulls from:

1. learn how to make enough money to no longer worry about money (power)
2. learn how to eat, train, and sleep to no longer worry about your health (sex)
3. learn how to play status games so that you no longer chase stranger’s approval (status)
4. learn how to play interpersonal games so you can maintain long-term relationships (love)

My Spicy Take:

The most direct path to completing stage 3 is to learn how to create, raise, and keep alive a corporate egregore that feeds you, your family, and serves the future.

My Spiciest Take:

A True Adult Raises Egregores

We’ll be exploring this from many angles throughout this series, but the brutal fact to face is you are adrift in a see of egregores, and until you decide to learn how to play the egregore game, you are dependent on psychopathic egregores for your and your family’s well-being (more on this in the next article).

The device your reading on is because of corporate egregores. The clothes you wear, the water you drink, the food you eat, the electricity you take for granted, all are the result of corporate egregores.

For most of my life I didn’t know I was allowed to create my own corporate egregore.

At 23, after graduating college (!), I had to read Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Work Week 3 times to understand what an entrepreneur was and that I was allowed to do that.

It took me another 7 years to realize that the most exploited tax class is the standard employee (W-2).

One of the foundational games to learn how to win at stage 3 is the money game.

It is either a happy accident or an intelligent wink that learning how to play the corporate egregore game well is one of the best ways to initiate yourself into your Soul Encounter.

Bill Plotkin uses Carl Jung as one of his main examples of what it looks like to go from Stage 3 to Stage 5.

By the time Jung was 35, he was a world-famous doctor. He had popularized innovations he made to the word association test, and caught the eye of Sigmund Freud, who wanted Jung to be the heir apparent to his growing psychoanalytic movement.

At 38, Jung started to see visions. He started hearing voices. He thought he was losing his mind. His soul was making contact with him.

Jung credits his family and his profession as being the anchors that allowed him to survive contact with his Soul:

It took him 8 years of nearly nightly work, but because of his family and his profession (and his mistress lol), he was able to make contact with soul and emerge into true adulthood at age 46

If you want to survive contact with your Soul:

1. learn how to make enough money to no longer worry about money
2. learn how to eat, train, and sleep to no longer worry about your health
3. learn how to play status games so that you no longer chase stranger’s approval
4. learn how to play interpersonal games so you can maintain and grow long-term relationships

In the next article, we’ll explore why the best path to learn these games is egromancy: the art and science of tracking, creating, and alchemizing egregores.

And that the call of our times is to apprentice in the art of corporate egromancy.

Song I'm Listening on Repeat

​Can't Make It - Zeds Dead​

Quotes I'm Enjoying

"Consistency is an underappreciated form of intentional magic disguised as mundane doing."
-Victoria Erickson

"The days can be easy if the years are consistent. You can write a book or get in shape or code an app in 30 minutes a day. The key is to not miss many days."
-James Clear