From Surviving to Living

This post brings together some of the strands I’ve been working on at Outside the Walls (on the disintegration of old systems), New Artisans (on the role of craft in a digital economy and the power of small-scale), and ongoing reflections on learning and power. It’s an accumulation of recent reading and reflection, offered to those who find themselves at a crossroads between identity and reimagining, between survival and self-authorship; between doing and becoming.

Note: Rather than interrupt this post with links, you will find them at the end (except for James Taylor - I can always make an exception for him)

There comes a point where dedication is converted to exploitation. Where we pay the price for gold stars and bonuses with shreds of our soul.

I have been reading Olli-Pekka Heinonen's book, "Learning as if Life Depended on It." One of his central themes is Karl Popper's "Three Worlds”; that reality can be understood as three overlapping domains: a first world of physical world of objects and events, a second, inner world of thoughts and experiences, and a third world of human knowledge, culture, and shared meaning. By distinguishing these realms, he highlights how ideas can exist and evolve independently of any one individual, shaping society as powerfully as material forces.

It provided me with the start point I needed to explore the idea of the Athanor, and how we might turn a world of work increasingly based on survival to one that supports a better idea of living.

In times of rapid change, we are overtrained and undereducated. We are taught to comply more than adapt, and rarely taught to perceive. It’s time to recover our learning as an act of becoming, not just survival.

Our industrial systems are doing to our World 3, our very essence, to human culture and meaning, what industrial farming does to the soil. It uses incentives like fertilisers to extract short-term value but leaves no time or space for the nutrients of imagination, meaning and community to regenerate. We have separated ownership of the land from care for the land, and we find ourselves trapped between Popper's World 1 and World 3.

Our children, from their earliest years, are trained more than educated. Instructed in the nature of phonemes, graphemes and split diagraphs, taught to translate and produce, far more than to create. They are expected to perform rather than play, and curiosity is subordinated to comprehension of curricula that march to a relentless beat tapped out by the expectations of the economy.
Their parents are little different, measured and surveilled in pursuit of productivity and efficiency required by stakeholders they will never meet.

It reminds me of the chorus in James Taylor's "Millworker"

'So may I work the mills just as long as I am able

and never meet the man whose name is on the label

It be me and my machine for the rest of the morning

And the rest of the afternoon, and the rest of my life'

Two Apprenticeships

Our first apprenticeship is the one we recognise: learning to survive. It’s an apprenticeship of function, of entering systems, passing tests, following due process. The literacy, language, data, and rules we need to navigate civilisation as it is.

It’s the domain of pages and processes. A world powered by Popper’s World 3, the accumulated knowledge of culture, science, and memory pulled into World 1 through performance and compliance. We need this apprenticeship. It is how we speak the language of our time. But there is another apprenticeship, quieter, more mysterious, and infinitely more important. It teaches us how to become human.

It is not about what we know, but who we are. It is the realm of Popper’s World 2: the interior life, the capacity for wonder, shame, joy, reflection, resistance, imagination, and grief. It’s the territory where meaning is metabolised, not absorbed. It asks: What is a life for? What does the world require of me? Who am I becoming?

Our problem is that we’ve built systems that are excellent at the first apprenticeship, almost indifferent to the second, and lost sight of that in our necessary busyness.

Biesta: Learnification

Gert Biesta calls this the “learnification” of education. We have reduced everything to what can be measured as learning: attainment, performance, and outputs. We evaluate teaching by its effect on skills. We reduce the curriculum to content. We turn professionals into “human capital” and students into “learners”; empty vessels waiting to be filled with employability. In doing so, we lose something vital: that education is not merely about learning. It is about becoming. Qualification? Yes. Socialisation? Fine. But without subjectification, the learner emerging as a subject in the world, education becomes a form of training at best, or conditioning at worst.

We stop seeing ourselves as agents and start seeing ourselves as operators.

Heinonen: A Learning Crisis, Not a Knowledge Crisis

Olli-Pekka Heinonen echoes this deeply. In Learning as if Life Depended on It, he argues that global crises are not caused by a lack of knowledge; they are caused by a lack of perception. We have megaphones, but no ears and advanced technology, but little wisdom. We have speed and scale, but no stillness. Learning must be reclaimed not as acquisition, but as attention, as the capacity to see and respond to what is actually present.

In this sense, the second apprenticeship is not optional. If we do not learn to learn differently, our technical knowledge will kill us.

Carlota Perez and the Technological Mid-Point

Carlota Perez gives a larger frame. Every technological revolution, she says, passes through two phases. First comes Installation: fast, disruptive, extractive, speculative. This is the Industrial Revolution. The Steam Engine. The Internet. The AI wave. Then comes Deployment: slower, integrative, distributive.

Revolution becomes civilisation, but only if culture and institutions catch up with technology. We are now at a dangerous mid-point between the two. Installation is near its peak. Deployment has not yet begun. Why? Because we have not yet passed through the second apprenticeship. We are clever machines with underdeveloped souls, lacking the ability to hear what the moment demands.

Craft and the Lineage of Learning

Traditional craft apprenticeships understood this duality. The apprentice watches, copies and learns the discipline of repetition. This is the survival apprenticeship. A necessary but temporary stage. No one in any craft stays an apprentice for life.

The journeyman in us must leave the familiar environment, travel, and test. Discover what the tools and materials mean when the teacher is no longer present. This is the strange, powerful, often disorienting apprenticeship of becoming. It echoes James Hollis’s description of midlife in The Middle Passage. That moment when we succeed according to conventional scripts, and realise those scripts no longer nourish us. This moment is now cultural. It is not just individuals. It is institutions, industries, and economies. We are all midway through our own journey. Somewhere between identity and reimagination.

The master is not merely a technician. They are a presence. A witness to the truth of the material. A steward of form and craft. They have integrated skill and soul. Often, they are also teachers; not because they need to be copied, but because they are passing on the lineage of becoming. We have far too few masters, in this sense. But the master is not beyond us.

The master is what happens when the two apprenticeships fuse into one coherent life. It is what we often encounter and think of as midlife.

Midlife is often seen as a personal crisis. but I think it’s a rite we haven’t yet named properly. It’s the moment when the survival apprenticeship shows its limits; when the inner voice, our World 2, begins to resist being dominated by the task of functioning. When our outer achievements no longer silence our inner questions.

“We can no longer afford to be smaller than the life that is calling us.” James Hollis

This, I think, is happening at scale. To leaders, systems and nations. It is the story of growth itself. What was once sufficient, productivity, growth, and efficiency, is no longer enough. The world is asking us for a different kind of learning.

To cross a threshold into presence.

If the second apprenticeship is about becoming, then learning is only half of it. We also need to forget. We must let go of assumptions, habits, self-images, and loyalties that belong to the past. It is not failure; it is composting.

It is the earth breaking down what no longer lives to feed the roots of something that might. Unlearning is sacred and dangerous because it threatens the systems built on old knowledge, but is essential to becoming a full participant in life.

As David Whyte once wrote: “To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.”

We cannot become visible until we set down the weight of what we learned only to survive.

The Athanor - bringing the two apprenticeships together.

What would it look like to develop learning, leadership, and society for both apprenticeships at once? Not just teaching skills, but encouraging emergence.

Not just "training" leaders, but developing consciousness, not just delivering strategy, but enabling discernment, and adequate heresy?

Not just voicing values, but embodying them?

We need new spaces that hold the second apprenticeship with reverence. Spaces where people can reflect, unlearn, cross thresholds, and perhaps begin to build the kind of mastery we desperately need.

Spaces like sanctuaries. Workshops. Conversations. Foundations. Possibilities, Spaces held not by those who know, but those who want to find out.

And we need people to hold those spaces.

Zoom will be open on Wednesday at 5;00pm (UK) as normal.

Be good to see you there.

“The best way to find out things, if you come to think of it, is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun; bang it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck round your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun.”

― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

Further Reading and Exploration

On the Purposes of Education and Overcoming Learnification:

• Gert Biesta – The Beautiful Risk of Education
• Gert Biesta – Good Education in an Age of Measurement
• Gert Biesta – Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future

On Existential Learning and Planetary Urgency:

• Olli-Pekka Heinonen – Learning as if Life Depended on It

The Inner Life and Midlife Transformation:

• James Hollis – The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife
• Carl Jung – The Stages of Life
• Sharon Blackie – If Women Rose Rooted
• Mary Catherine Bateson – Composing a Life

On Craft, Mastery, and the New Artisans:

• Richard Sennett – The Craftsman
• David Pye – The Nature of Design
• Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order (Vols. 1–4)

On Technology Revolutions and Systemic Renewal:

• Carlota Perez – Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
• Carlota Perez – The Double Bubble at the Turn of the Century

On Adult Development, Mastery, and Unlearning:

• Robert Kegan – In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life
• Parker J. Palmer – Let Your Life Speak
• Ikujiro Nonaka & Hirotaka Takeuchi – The Knowledge-Creating Company