Crossing Between Worlds: Moving and Being Moved Through the Transitions of Life

PART I: THE FRAMEWORK

"You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or a path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realise your potential."

— Joseph Campbell⁠ i

1. INTRODUCTION

This book is for people who are Crossing Between Worlds.

People who have been struck by losses, changes, realisations, significant hurts, or a waking up to the reality of this mortal coil, people who would leave an old world behind, even though the new world is fraught with uncertainty and there’s no guarantee that it will all work out. You could be in your mid-forties, facing your third life-transition after losing a parent and experiencing a career change; or you could be in your second year of university, facing your first legitimate crossroads in love, experiencing betrayal, and asking what the heck do I do with my life? type of question.

In other words, this book is for people who are making changes on the outside and on the inside, inching into a new season of life.

The impetus for embarking on a path of Crossing Between Worlds might stem from one of the following: Losing a job, the death of a loved one, being struck by an illness, an intractable addiction, a relationship breakup, burnout from a lifeless career, a betrayal, mustering the courage to leave an abusive relationship, a divorce. Sometimes, life just likes to throw a bunch of these challenges at us all at once. And it’s not just negative stuff. The urge to create a new life can come from stepping out of high school, getting married, the birth of your first child, moving countries, a new career opportunity, beginning a new life project after a reexamination of core existential priorities.

For some, the motivation for change could be the painful realisation that they have been an asshole for a long time. They have had enough of their own attitude. Their conscience is banging on their door. For others, a repeated pattern of others taking advantage of their kindness makes them realise they can no longer be conflict-avoidant. Resentment is eating them from the inside out.

How Tech Is Trapping Us Between Worlds

And then there are those who realise they're currently wasting their life, even though they didn't start off that way. Our technological devices—especially the mobile phone—have insidiously not only messed up our attention span, but have also strayed from our original intentions for them. They’re more than just distractions. Tech companies call us "Users'' for a reason: We are all addicts in our dopamine-drenched culture.

Our youth are paying an especially high price. Anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide rates among the young, especially girls, have increased dramatically since the period of 2010–2015. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes in his 2024 book, Anxious Generation, that this was the period of the great rewiring of our children that we never consented to.

But what in the world happened between 2010 and 2015 that led to a proliferation of mental health concerns?

In 2010, Apple introduced the iPhone 4, the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. Promptly, Samsung followed suit. That same year, Instagram was created as an app that could be used only on smartphones, says Haidt. He adds,

For the first few years, there was no way to use it on a desktop or laptop. Instagram had a small user base until 2012, when it was purchased by Facebook. Its user base then grew rapidly (from 10 million near the end of 2011 to 90 million by early 2013). We might therefore say that the smartphone and selfie-based social media ecosystem that we know today emerged in 2012, with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram following the introduction of the front-facing camera. By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that ‘everyone’ was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. Over the next few years the social media ecosystem became even more enticing with the introduction of ever more powerful filters and editing software within Instagram and via external apps such as Facetune. Whether she used filters or not, the reflection each girl saw in the mirror got less and less attractive relative to the girls she saw on her phone. While girls’ social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones.

Essentially, a play-based childhood has been replaced by a phone-based childhood. Social media is the new toy that everyone seems to love and hate at the same time. No other theories seem to explain this decline in mental health among the young (especially given the timing), including economic crises, climate change, academic pressure, an increase in self-reporting, and the age-old admonition of the proverbial statistics professor who says correlation is not causation.⁠ ¹

Just to be clear, this is not a Luddite-attack on every form of modern technology. I’m a fan of great inventions, and we are beneficiaries of these tools in so many ways. The discovery of fire marked a significant turning point that shaped human evolution. But like fire, if we do not learn to control technology we risk being consumed by its power. If we continue to be passive users and don’t actively discern what’s best for us all, we might burn the house down.

We have to ask ourselves: What is the ultimate price we are willing to pay for a culture of junkies on their phones, waiting for the next dopamine hit?

Vietnamese philosopher C. Thi Nyugen rightly names the issue that is happening in our culture Value Capture. In his paper of the same title, he notes, …It is rather difficult to say, in a principled way, exactly why value capture is so horrifying. For one thing, value capture is often consensual. Nyugen adds, In value capture, we outsource the process of value deliberation. In other words, we allow our core values to be overruled by quantifiable metrics. We might have begun by caring about things like good health, developing skills and expertise, or a job we love. But increasingly, with the nudge of technology, our values and goals become co-opted by what the machine values. Think FitBit. Nyugen says,

Even if fitness was your main goal, the FitBit can exert a narrowing influence. Exercise can be valuable in all sorts of ways that aren’t measured by a FitBit. A FitBit doesn’t capture the ecstasy of complex skillful motion. It doesn’t capture the camaraderie of team sports, the meditative calm of paddling a canoe across a quiet lake, or the aesthetic loveliness of a delicate rock climbing move. A FitBit measures exactly one thing: Steps.

Nyugen, an avid gamer himself, had a lightbulb moment when he heard a well-known speaker give a talk at a conference. The German game-designer made the following remark: "The most important thing in my toolbox is the point system... [because] it tells the person what to desire. Nyugen told an interviewer, This is what I’m worried about. It changes what we desire."

What has all of this got to do with making transitions in your life? My hope through this book is to advocate for you to follow your deep desires, and not let your progress be stymied by meaningless, shallow desires. I think you and I can agree that there are many distractions going around.⁠ ² Think about the last time you were about to do something useful for yourself and got sucked into the ether on your little device. When your attention gets co-opted, it messes with your intentions. The last thing I want for you is to give up on your deep desires because you got lost in the infinite scroll of TikTok.

Desire is a life-force that has the potential to bring more life. Desire is a seed planted within you, and it’s your job to not only nourish and raise it to life, but also protect it from Value Capture.

You Might Not Need This Book

Though it is not a good marketing strategy for me to say this, I thought I should make it clear: you can do without this book. People have been navigating and adapting to changes in their lives long before the printing press was invented. They seemed to do just fine with all the resources they had. In fact, many people go through transitions in life without any kind of guidance. In Chinese, the word crisis (Wéi Jī) means a time of both danger and opportunity. The one reason this book exists is to help you see and seize the opportunity in a time of shake-ups, to take heed of your deep desires and fan the amber within you, so that you get a fighting chance to experience deep joy in this one life.

Crisis in Mandarin Wéi Jī (Crisis)

Flip through the pages of this book. You will notice that Crossing Between Worlds serves as a vast map of possibilities. This book is not about having more information or catchphrases; it acts as a catalyst for change. It is designed to help you experience life. It is not just about having more ideas; it’s about becoming who you really are. In other words, this book will ask of you more than you would ask of yourself on your own.

I hope that this all will help you deliberate the types of games you are going to play—and enjoy playing them, even when the road gets rough.

1 For more on why other competing explanations like people are more willing to seek help, or kids have less independence fall short, read Jean Twenge’s article: afterbabel.com/p/13-explanations-mental-health-crisis .

2 One of my challenges writing this book for about three years has been wrestling with endless distractions. Maybe I should use a typewriter for my next project.

2. BRIDGE-CROSSING

Over the past 20 years in my clinical practice as a psychologist, this is where I meet and walk alongside fellow travellers: on a bridge.

The journey of Crossing Between Worlds is a defining period in one’s life. Give or take, you’ll probably experience only a handful of such transitions in your lifetime. These periods are often coloured with darkness, uncertainty, ambiguity, fear, suffering, and grief. It’s unfortunate that we have a proclivity to reduce our experience to diagnostic labels and reach for the nearest medical or psychological explanation, thereby leading us to water down this liminal state as a mental health issue.

In our attempts to make sense of it all, we use various clinical terms, from depression and anxiety to ADHD, trauma, and others. But when you become too quick to name things,⁠ ¹ you fail to follow the calling path in front of you, the new world that is beckoning you to inhabit it. While the embodied experience and symptoms of such a period can be discomforting and distressful, they are signals, and not the issue in and of themselves. Sometimes, all it takes to shift our state is to ask ourselves, What’s making me depressed? What has happened that led me to feel this way? Not everything has a clear cause and effect, but it would do us good to have a better understanding of our nature, how we nurture ourselves through the emotional needs that we have (more on that later, in Nurture Our Nature). By viewing our emotional pains solely from a medical perspective, we run the risk of treating only the symptom and not the problem.

Moving from an old story to a new one is akin to crossing a bridge. This bridge is often wobbly. Your footing is unsteady, your mind is racing, and your heart is riddled with anxiety as you take each step.

And yet, at the brink of it all, the opportunity arises for us to see things differently. As you move along—and you might not fully grasp this while you are doing it—the seasons are changing. Your needs are no longer the same as they once were; what’s required of you previously no longer applies in this upcoming fresh territory.

But the movement between worlds is not exactly new. Like the seasons, we move in circles. Periods of crises might vary, but the inner-challenges that surface have similar patterns and schemas. Most of us will face at least three to five major life disruptions, or as author Bruce Feiler calls them, Lifequakes.⁠ i Hence, it makes perfect sense to learn deeply from past reckonings when you are at the fork in the road.

This book is about listening to the needs and seasons that arise in times of change and crisis. It is about moving and being moved. Moving implies acting upon our intentions and tilting the sails to help us move in accordance. Being moved, on the other hand, is to allow ourselves to be touched and inspired by what unfolds in front of us, even when—or rather, especially when—it is not our choice.

To move is to resist becoming the victims of our circumstances. To move is an act of will and responsibility. To be moved is to allow ourselves to be touched by what’s in front of us, and to utilise that as a mobilising force (See Paradox 15. Control and Surrender).

Researchers in human emotions offer a fascinating insight. A review article by Janis Zickfeld and colleagues suggested that being ‘moved’ should be treated as a distinct emotion.⁠ ii Sensations of being moved include tears, chills, a lump in the throat, goosebumps, and warmth in the chest. When seen in this light, it’s easy to understand why the experience of being moved is often considered a passive one, i.e., not something we can actively control. Let me do my Chinese teacher proud and point out that in Mandarin, being moved,  Gǎn Dòng [感动], literally translates as to feel movement.⁠ ²

Here’s another interesting point to note. The lexeme being moved not only implies approach and prosocial tendencies, but it also suggests insight, meaning, and personal growth.

This book does not offer a fixed path. Nor should you simply take someone else’s path. Artist Austin Kleon says, Some advice can be a vice.⁠ iii

You must ultimately forge your own path. There is no formula, only a form, a structure that can guide you. Treat this book as a structural scaffold. You pull it down once you are done.

Main Idea

This is the central idea of the book:

Our nature is designed to be nurtured, informed by our needs and the season we are in.

We are going to unpack, one at a time, each of the four factors (nature, nurture, need, and season) embedded in this single sentence, and then develop a personalised map for the way forward using the Personalised Paradoxical Profile (P3), which will help you as you are Crossing Between Worlds.

Nature → Nurture → Needs → Naming the Season → Complete the P3 → Read the 15 Paradoxes → Revisit Your P3 → Course of Action

1 To be clear, at times, having a label to define the problem that we have can bring a huge sense of relief. For instance, to be formally diagnosed as autistic in adulthood can bring great comfort to some, since this helps the individual not only to make sense of their challenges as a child, but also helps them navigate the world ahead of them, i.e., learning social skills systemically or learning that it’s ok to retreat when they has been in a noisy environment for longer than they can manage due to sensory overload.

2 I failed at Chinese at my GCE O Levels exams, twice. I couldn't read 80% of the text, so I did my Chinese oral exams in English, much to the amazement of my classmates.

3. NURTURE YOUR NATURE

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

— Gregory Bateson.

What Is Your Nature?

One of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself is to figure out your nature. The Latin natura, or Nature, means both birth and character. Let’s unpack each of the two.

By Birth

By Birth, we are predisposed to a certain temperament, and somewhat bound by our genetic underpinnings. Differences in temperament from an early age becomes apparent when you observe your children. One might be easy going and leap non-hesitantly into the playground with other kids, and the other might be very sensitive to the external environment and needs time to observe others on the playground before they set foot in the sand.

The different shades of temperaments shape our personality. Personality is a set of enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that make an individual unique. Our personality colours how we see the world. Not only does it cause us to perceive things differently from others, but our unique personalities also lead us to consider different facts. For instance, when dealing with conflict at work, a highly empathetic individual is more likely to consider the feelings and perspectives of others involved, while a logical person is more likely to prioritise effectiveness and efficiency towards the end result. Likewise, individuals higher in Openness to Experience—one of the Big Five personality constructs that we will talk about later—are less likely to conform to pre-existing beliefs and are more willing to consider information that contradicts their existing views.

Why is understanding personality constructs so important? In an in-depth course on personality, Jordan Peterson argues it’s because you are a person who is situated in a social world, and you have a personality and must contend with other personalities.⁠ ¹ Different personalities have different proclivities in their moral and political ideologies. One would imagine that our moral and political beliefs are primarily based on reasoned judgements, but in his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt notes that our moral foundation and political ideology are shaped by our temperaments, more so than we imagine. For example, individuals high in Conscientiousness, characterised by traits such as self-discipline and adherence to rules, may place a strong emphasis on moral values related to loyalty and authority, which are key aspects of conservative moral foundations. On the other hand, individuals who are high in Agreeableness, characterised by traits such as compassion and cooperation, may prioritise moral values related to care and fairness, which are central to liberal moral foundations.

Given the above, and based on the current empirical understanding, what is a useful framework that can help us understand our nature a little better? What are the givens in our temperaments from birth? I would argue that the Five Factor Model (FFM), commonly referred to as the Big Five Personality Traits, is one of the most practical tools for understanding ourselves.

An easy way to remember these five factors is to use the acronym OCEAN. It stands for Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. See the following table for an elaboration of each trait, along with its corresponding advantages and disadvantages when pushed to the edges.

Table 1. The Big Five Personality Construct

You might be interested in understanding more about yourself through the lens of the Big Five Personality Construct. I suggest three options for doing so in Appendix B.

Whichever version you decide to explore with, treat the Big Five as a vocabulary you can use to recognise your nature, as well as a way to see others as they are. However, do not treat your temperament as fixed. You can broaden your nature based on where you are going—especially as you are Crossing between Worlds. You’ll discover and unravel more about yourself than you would expect. (In each of 15 Paradoxes, I provide specific suggestions for certain personality factors, under Broaden Your Nature).

By Character

If one facet of our nature is By Birth, the other is By Character, which comes from the Greek word, kharakter, or chisel. In a sense, when we move towards our intentions and face the inherent challenges along the way, our character is formed and chiselled into being.

Our temperament is not destiny. Dan Gilbert says, Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. Tempting as it seems, and as useful as they can be, we should not completely outsource the process of understanding ourselves to a personality test. This might seem contradictory to what was mentioned earlier regarding the Big Five Personality construct, but the key is to have a clear and balanced view about how we can understand who we are.

In Annie Murphy Paul’s book The Cult of Personality Testing, she points out that these personality tests contribute to oversimplified categorisations of complex human beings, potentially leading to discrimination, biases, and misguided decision-making. For instance, there is still a prolific use of personality tests by one in five Fortune 1,000 companies to assess candidates for executive roles, expending an estimated $2 billion on such assessments.⁠ i Yet the evidence is poor on the use of personality tests to predict job performance.⁠ ii

The obsession with personality had become so crazy in 2019 that Facebook had to ban such quizzes, because more than 87 million people had given away their personal information in exchange for the answer to a quiz.⁠ iii I have noticed people in my clinical practice who pigeon-hole themselves prematurely after taking a personality test, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)—often dished out to them in a corporate setting—or an Enneagram test they found online. Notice the language that they would use to describe themselves thereafter: I am an INTJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging) or I am a Type 3 (The Achiever). To be sure, this can be useful as a springboard for self-awareness. But we must take caution not to over-identify and transfix ourselves with these constructs.⁠ iv You are not an INTJ, an ENFJ, or whatever Type 1, 2, 3… These are rough clues that give you hints of who you are based on the past projected onto the present. These are not maps for where you are going and who you are to become. As Derek Sivers notes,

Putting a label on a person is like putting a label on the water in a river. It’s ignoring the flow of time… I’m an introvert, so that’s why I can’t. No. Definitions are not reasons [emphasis mine]. Definitions are just your old responses to past situations. What you call your personality is just a past tendency. New situations need a new response… Nature changes seasons at regular intervals. So should you.⁠ v

We are, however, about to create the map for the territory ahead of you.

Nurture Our Nature

We needn’t get caught up in the debate about nature vs. nurture. Our nature is designed to be nurtured. Each of us has a unique predisposition and proclivity. Our task in this lifetime is to cultivate what’s inside of us. This is our responsibility. As the great jazz musician Miles Davis put it, Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself.

Why would it take a long time to figure out a way to fully express who we really are? Perhaps because there is so much noise to cut through and so many competing voices inside of us to wrestle with.

There’s also a big difference between what’s right and what’s right for you. It’s easier than you think to get caught up in the former—and take for granted the latter. Why is this so? Because of the allure of the competing voices outside of ourselves, from those who try to peddle us snakeoil, telling us stories about what we should want, what we should need. It’s much easier to follow the pack than it is to heed the small voice that speaks from our nature.

Nurture your nature. You can tilt the direction and push towards the edges of your development. You can identify aspects of your personality and stretch towards where you want to go. The goal is not to fixate on what you've been given. Rather, it is what you do with what you have that matters. Ultimately, the journey in Crossing Between Worlds is to broaden your personality.

Our job is to mother our nature. Like a gardener, we plant the seeds, and we give them water, we give them light—perhaps not too much for some types—and make sure they are rooted in good soil, nourished by good fertiliser. After all, good things grow from shit.

Here’s where we are so far:

Nature → Nurture → Needs → Naming the Season → Complete the P3 → Read the 15 Paradoxes →