Interconnected Self
How we understood ourselves before we became individuals
This is the fifth and final article in December’s series, “Life on the Ground.”
Quick recap: In November, we climbed the Ladder of Abstraction. This month, we descended—exploring what life was actually like before we started climbing. We’ve visited a world of immediate feedback, where the mind could rest because you always knew how things were going. We’ve explored experiential learning, where knowledge moved through watching and doing rather than symbols and abstraction. We’ve felt the natural environment—the living world that our nervous system still searches for.
This week: the deepest factor of all. Not what surrounded us, but how we understood ourselves.
Let me take you somewhere.
You’re waking up in the Western Desert of Australia. The sun isn’t up yet, but the sky is lightening, and the people around you are stirring. Your family. Your kin. The ones whose identity is woven into yours so thoroughly that where you end and they begin isn’t entirely clear.
You don’t think of yourself as a mind inside a body. You don’t experience your thoughts as things you generate—private productions of an isolated self. When thoughts arise, they feel more like sounds. Something received. Something heard. The Pintupi word for thinking, understanding, and hearing is the same word: kulininpa. Literally: to hear. The organ of thought is the ear.
You rise and move through the day. There’s no separation between you and the country you walk through. Certain places are part of you—you refer to them in the first person. The land isn’t a backdrop. It’s kin. It’s identity. It’s self.
When evening comes and you sit with others around a fire, there’s no voice in your head narrating your experience, evaluating how you’re being perceived, constructing a “you” out of mental content. The mind is quiet. Not because you’ve trained it into silence. Because there’s nothing to grasp at. Thoughts come and go like weather. They’re not you.
And in that quiet, something else is present.
A feeling of being exactly where you belong. Of being part of something larger. Of being fully, completely, alive.
The Self Before the Mirror
For most of human history, this is how people experienced being a self.
Not as an isolated mind generating thoughts. Not as a private consciousness looking out at an external world. But as a node in a web—connected to kin, to community, to place, to the living world.
Psychologists call this “self-construal”—how you perceive and define yourself in relation to others and your environment. The Western world is dominated by what’s called the “independent self-construal”: the self as autonomous, separate, defined by internal attributes like thoughts, feelings, and personal goals.
But this isn’t the only way to be a self. It isn’t even the most common way, historically.
The Mbuti of the Ituri Forest experience the forest itself as part of their identity—they refer to it as mother, as father, as a living being they belong to. North American Indigenous traditions often describe the mind as existing between people rather than within them—emphasizing the shared mind of each relationship over private mental states. The Kanak of New Caledonia have few words for internal mental processes; their relationship between self and environment is one where “each plays its own role, but each lacks distinct boundaries.” The Illongot of the Philippines focus “not on what goes on in the mind but rather what happens between people.”
These aren’t primitive failures to develop a “real” self. They’re different ways of being a self—ways that were adaptive for hundreds of thousands of years.
And they share something crucial: the self is broader (including environment, community, relationships) and simultaneously narrower (less identified with internal mental states).
This is what I call the interconnected self-construal. It’s not the same as interdependence, which emphasizes social relationships. The interconnected self extends further—to nature, to place, to the living world—while also involving less attachment to the mental chatter we Westerners call “me.”
The Organ of Thought Is the Ear
Here’s what’s hard for the modern mind to grasp:
When you don’t identify with your thoughts—when mental content isn’t experienced as the core of who you are—the mind is naturally quiet.
Not forced into silence. Not disciplined through practice. Just... quiet. Because there’s no one grasping at the content. No one constructing a “me” out of the mental weather.
The Pintupi make this vivid. When anthropologist Leon Petchkovsky told Pintupi participants that “we Westerners usually think that we make our own thoughts,” they responded with laughter. Incredulity. The idea was absurd. Thoughts aren’t self-generated. They arrive. You hear them.
This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a description of experience.
When thinking feels like hearing—receptive, passive, something that happens to you rather than something you do—there’s nothing to grasp at. Thoughts come. Thoughts go. They’re not you.
And when you’re not busy building a self out of mental content, attention is freed.
It lands on the body. On the environment. On the people nearby. On the living world.
That’s presence. Not as achievement. As remainder. What’s left when the self stops performing its own existence.
“The Eccentricity Among Cultures”
We assume the independent self-construal is natural. Universal. The way humans just are.
It isn’t.
The prioritization of mental states—treating thoughts and feelings as the core of identity—is not shared in most cultures across history. Anthropologists have described the modern Western self as “culturally peculiar,” “an eccentricity among cultures,” and “far from expressing the common experience of humanity.”
Einstein called the sense of separation inherent in our self-construal an “optical delusion of consciousness.”
How did this peculiar self emerge?
It wasn’t one thing. It was a series of historical developments, each reinforcing the others:
The transition to agriculture, which required long-term planning and individual property.
Ancient Greek culture, with its emphasis on debate, rhetoric, and personal autonomy.
Christianity—particularly the doctrine of “inner assent,” which elevated internal beliefs over external behavior, making what happens inside the mind spiritually primary.
Industrial capitalism, which required individuals to sell their labor as autonomous units.
Cartesian philosophy, with its famous declaration: cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. The self, defined as the thinking thing.
Each step moved us further toward a self that is private, mental, and separate.
And each step made the mind busier. Because when you are your thoughts, you can’t stop thinking without threatening your own existence.
What a Quiet Mind Provides
Here’s the paradox that the modern mind can’t compute:
When you don’t identify with your thoughts—when you’re not grasping at mental content, not constructing a “me” out of the narration—you don’t feel less like yourself.
You feel more grounded.
More connected.
More like you belong.
More fully alive.
This is counterintuitive to us. We assume that if we let go of the mental narrative, we’d dissolve. Disappear. Become nothing.
But that’s not what happens.
What happens is that attention, freed from self-construction, lands on what’s actually here. The body. The breath. The sounds and textures of the present moment. The people nearby. The living world.
And in that landing, something arrives that the busy mind can never produce:
A sense of groundedness. Of deep connection. Of belonging to something larger than the story in your head.
This is what the Mbuti have when they call the forest their parent. What the Pintupi have when they refer to places in the first person. What Indigenous cultures around the world have described in countless ways.
It’s not mystical. It’s not spiritual achievement. It’s what remains when the self stops narrating itself into existence.
This is what it means to be fully alive.
Not adding something. Subtracting something. The grasping. The identifying. The relentless mental performance of being a “me.”
The Shift That Proves the Connection
If you’re skeptical that self-construal and cognitive style are really connected, consider the Temiar.
The Temiar are an Indigenous group in the rainforests of northern Malaysia. Traditionally, they experience the forest as part of their identity and prioritize concrete, present-focused awareness—a cognitive style akin to mindfulness.
Over the past two decades, some Temiar have converted to Christianity.
And researchers have documented what happened: the shift in religious framework led to a shift in self-construal, from interconnected to more independent. And that shift led to a change in cognitive style—from concrete and present-oriented to abstract and future-oriented.
Same people. Same genetics. Same forest.
Different self-construal. Different mind.
This is the bidirectional relationship at the heart of the environmental model. Mindfulness practices can shift self-construal toward more interconnected forms. But the reverse is also true: shifts in self-construal change how the mind works.
The environment shapes the self. The self shapes attention. Attention shapes experience.
Windows Back
We can’t return to pre-modernity. We can’t unlearn the independent self. And we don’t need to.
But we can create conditions that loosen its grip.
Time in nature. Not as backdrop, but as presence. Research shows that nature exposure leads to a broader, more inclusive self-construal—a stronger sense of connection to the living world. The longer the exposure, the more the boundaries soften.
Time with horses. A horse doesn’t care about your mental narrative. It responds to what you’re actually doing—your body, your energy, your presence. Working with a horse requires you to drop the performance and show up. And in that showing up, the busy mind quiets. Not because you forced it. Because you stopped feeding it.
Time in community. Real presence with others. Not networking. Not performance. The kind of being-with that doesn’t require you to construct a self to present. The Pintupi experience shared identity as “a primary feature of selfhood.” We’ve mostly lost this. But it can be remembered.
Practices that shift attention outward. Mindfulness practices—particularly those that emphasize decentering, the recognition that thoughts are not self—can gradually loosen identification with mental content. Not by force. By familiarity. By repeatedly noticing that thoughts come and go, and you remain.
These aren’t escapes from modern life. They’re access points. Windows back to a way of being that’s still available—still underneath—still the ground.
What We’ve Found on the Ground
This month, we’ve explored four factors that made presence effortless in immediate-return environments:
Immediate feedback. Experiential learning. Natural environments. Interconnected self-construal.
At first, they look like a list. Four separate features of a simpler world.
But look closer, and you’ll see they share something.
Each one reduces the grip of abstract mental activity. Each one quiets the narrating mind. Each one returns attention to what’s actually here.
And the fourth factor—how you experience being a self—is the deepest of all. It’s the keystone. Without it, the others can’t fully land.
Immediate feedback reduces the need for mental simulation. But if you’re identified with the simulating mind, you’ll find something else to simulate.
Experiential learning keeps attention embodied. But if you’re identified with abstract thought, you’ll drift back into your head.
Natural environments provide safety signals. But if the self is busy narrating its own existence, the nervous system can’t fully receive them.
Interconnected self-construal is the receptivity. The not-grasping that lets presence happen. The quieting of the mental performance that lets the other factors do their work.
For most of human history, the environment supported this way of being. The immediate feedback, the embodied learning, the natural world, the interconnected self—they worked together, reinforcing each other, keeping attention anchored in the here and now.
We didn’t need mindfulness practices. The structure of life itself was the practice.
Then we built a different world. And the structure reversed.
Delayed feedback. Abstract learning. Built environments. The independent self.
Now the mind is busy by default. Now we grasp at thoughts and call them “me.” Now presence requires effort, discipline, apps, retreats.
We don’t have a mindfulness deficit. We have an environmental mismatch.
A mind shaped for one world, living in another.
The Question That Remains
Once you see it this way, the question changes.
It’s not: How do I become more mindful?
It’s: How do I access the ground while living at the top of the ladder of abstraction?
We can’t return to immediate-return environments. We have mortgages, deadlines, long-term projects that genuinely require planning. We live in a delayed-return world, and we’re not leaving.
But maybe we don’t have to choose.
Maybe the ladder and the ground aren’t opposites. Maybe the capacity for abstraction and the capacity for presence can coexist—not as compromise, but as integration.
Maybe there’s a way to live at the top of the ladder and still know, in your bones, what it feels like to stand on the ground.
That’s what January is about.
—James
Note on AI collaboration: The Alive Letter explores how humans can stay fully human while learning to work with modern technology. In that same spirit, I collaborate with AI in the creation of these articles. As an industrial/organizational psychologist who studies human-AI collaboration, I carefully guide, refine, and evaluate AI outputs. At its best, this partnership helps me more clearly and authentically communicate my own thoughts and perspectives than I am able to alone.