| I am not talking about emotional intelligence becoming mainstream. In that, I agree with you. Instead, I am talking about how the methods to work through emotional debt becoming mainstream. I am speaking as a long-time meditator. I have worked through a number of really intense issues. The most recent relating to my wife's miscarriage a couple months ago. I was fortunate in that my manager gave me some space with that ... but believe me, the guilt from not being able to keep up with the team would come up. The methods I have used are certainly not mainstream, and draws from a wide variety of traditions. From where I look, a lot of people are just rediscovering those methods, but are still scratching the surface. While people know there is something off -- it leaks into a search for "work life balance", or a growing realization of the overwork culture in the name of productivity -- actually employing the therapeutic methods is not really mainstream. The reaction to the pandemic is a great example. I see a lot of people getting caught by their existential anguish, what the Hindu and Buddhists call dukkha. I see this not just from people inside tech, but also the people outside of tech. I sensed it and saw it in the first few days when people were panick buying things at the grocery store. Making runs to buy up all the chickens they can. I see it in the reports as parents have to homeschool their kids for the first time. I see it in folks as the boredom settles in with the confinement. I don't just see it in the mainstream. The folks who dabble in the alternative spirituality got caught up in this too. It is clear to me that this author has faced his own dukkha. That's a journey that is ... no backyard picnic. There is an deep-seated aversion to this work. That is at the root of carrying the emotional traumas. What is brilliant about the author is that, he is speaking about this as a leader. He is turning these methods our modern society have abandoned, and reintroducing them. So yeah, he talks about "emotional debt". That isn't what I was talking about becoming mainstream. It is facing existential crises and the dukkha that he is slipping in there. Once you start on this kind of work, it goes into the rabbit hole, and surfaces up a lot of things. |