What if caring about politics didn't have to cost you your peace?
You care about what's happening. You want to stay informed. You want to participate. You just don't want politics taking over your life.
The Politics Project is a four-month exploration of politics, psychology, media, worldview, and cultural change for people who care deeply, but do not want to be consumed.
So...what exactly is The Politics Project?
The central idea is simple: for four months, we are going to work on politics rather than simply in politics.
Not as a way of escaping the world. As a way of understanding our experience of it, the systems shaping what we see, the worldviews colliding around us, and the kind of participation that becomes possible when we are less reactive and more grounded.
I don't understand what is happening anymore.
Maybe you recognize this.
You care deeply about what's happening. And lately, it can feel like everything is coming apart. Institutions and norms you assumed were relatively stable suddenly don't seem stable at all. Every election, court decision, policy change, international crisis, or breaking-news alert seems to bring another reason to worry.
So you pay more attention. You read more. You scroll more. You listen to another podcast. You check what happened, and then you check what happened since you checked what happened.
And somehow, knowing more isn't making you feel better.
This course is not about disengaging.
This is not a course about becoming less political.
We're not going to pretend the stakes aren't real. We're not going to tell you everything is fine. We're not going to tell you that every political position is equally valid. And we're definitely not spending four months sticking our heads in the sand.
Instead, we're going to ask a better question:
What if being less consumed by politics actually made us better at engaging with it?
Less reactive. Less easily manipulated. More discerning about information. More capable of seeing complexity. More able to understand people. More intentional about where we put our effort.
Not disengaged. Grounded.
We're going to work on politics, not in politics.
Most political content keeps us inside politics: what happened, who's winning, who's lying, what the polls say, what the other side just did.
For four months, we are going to periodically step outside that stream and ask different questions.
What's happening inside me when I engage with politics?
How is the information environment shaping what I see?
Why can two intelligent people look at the same country and seemingly see two different realities?
What role do worldview and cultural development play?
Given all of that, how do I want to participate?
Four Movements
Movement ISeeing Your Experience
We'll explore thought, state of mind, story, identity, certainty, and why political events can become so psychologically consuming.
Movement IISeeing the Machine
We'll look at the attention economy, outrage, algorithms, information environments, polarization, and why the world arriving on our screens can feel so relentless.
Movement IIISeeing the Moment
We'll zoom way out into worldview, cultural development, Spiral Dynamics, Ken Wilber, and other lenses for understanding whether this moment is part of a larger transition.
Movement IVFinding Your Place
We'll bring everything back down to earth: staying informed, engaging intentionally, navigating disagreement, choosing where to put our energy, and deciding who we want to be while history is happening.
Exactly what we'll cover
Each teaching week includes a content video, an experiential video, takeaway work, and a live Thursday conversation about what people are actually seeing.
Movement I - Seeing Your Experience
What Are You Actually Experiencing?
Begin separating political events from our psychological experience of those events, and explore what happens in the space between the two.
The Political Mind
Thought, prediction, fear, imagined futures, and why our state of mind can radically change the political world we experience.
The Stories We Live Inside
How we turn thousands of disconnected events into narratives about what is happening, why it's happening, and where everything is going.
Identity, Certainty & Being Right
What happens when political beliefs become intertwined with identity, belonging, morality, and our sense of who we are.
Movement II - Seeing the Machine
The Attention Economy
How modern political information reaches us, why attention has become so valuable, and what it means to decide who gets access to yours.
Outrage, Fear & the Business of Attention
Why threat, conflict, novelty, and outrage capture us so effectively, and why what's most visible is not always what's most representative.
Your Reality Tunnel
Confirmation bias, selective exposure, algorithms, communities, and the unsettling fact that none of us sees from nowhere.
Polarization & the Other Side
How political disagreement becomes personal, how opponents become enemies, and why caricature can quietly replace understanding.
Politics in the Wild
No new teaching this week. Instead, we'll let the first half of the project breathe and notice politics in actual life: family, generations, stories, certainty, disagreement, and the urge to correct someone across the table.
Movement III - Seeing the Moment
What Is a Worldview?
Before Spiral Dynamics, we explore worldview itself: truth, authority, fairness, freedom, responsibility, progress, and the assumptions underneath political opinions.
The Spiral
An introduction to Graves, Spiral Dynamics, and developmental thinking as a map for understanding how different ways of making meaning emerge in response to changing life conditions.
The Three Worlds Colliding
Traditional, modern, and postmodern worldviews, and how each can see truth, justice, freedom, institutions, religion, science, identity, inequality, America, and progress differently.
Post-Truth, Backlash & What Comes Next
Drawing from Ken Wilber and other sources, we'll explore post-truth, backlash, the crisis of the cultural leading edge, and what an emerging integrative perspective might make visible.
Movement IV - Finding Your Place
Staying Informed Without Being Consumed
How to design a political information practice that helps you understand the world without feeding a compulsive emotional loop.
Disagreement, Conversation & Contact
What changes when disagreement becomes less about winning or fixing and more about seeing the person, the worldview, and the moment more clearly.
Agency, Action & Where to Put Your Energy
Voting, advocacy, protest, volunteering, donating, conversation, local work, rest: how to distinguish meaningful participation from endless reaction.
Who Do I Want to Be While History Is Happening?
We bring the project home by asking how to live, participate, care, and remain human in a period none of us can fully predict.
What this actually looks like
Each week has a simple arc: learn something, test it in real life, then come back together to make sense of what you saw.
New teaching and experiential videos
A clear teaching video and a shorter experiential prompt are released so you have something specific to watch for during the week.
Notice politics in ordinary life
You explore the week’s ideas while reading the news, scrolling, talking with people, noticing your reactions, and moving through your actual life.
Live group call, recorded
We gather for conversation, reflection, questions, and a preview of what is coming next. Calls are recorded if you cannot attend live.
There will also be a WhatsApp group for conversation, questions, and observations between calls.
Rigorous, but not homework hell.
We'll draw from a wide range of ideas and research throughout the project, including the Three Principles understanding, Spiral Dynamics and developmental psychology, Ken Wilber and The Post-Truth World, political psychology, polarization research, media and attention research, history, and cultural change.
But this is not a book club, and you do not need a graduate degree or a stack of textbooks.
My job is to do the heavy lifting and bring the useful ideas into the room.
The intellectual posture
We are not treating any one framework as the final explanation. We are using good lenses, holding them lightly, and asking what becomes visible when we look through them.
What you'll gain
A deeper understanding of why politics affects you the way it does.
Better ability to recognize when you've moved from being informed into being psychologically consumed.
A clearer view of how your information environment shapes the world you see.
A better understanding of how intelligent, decent people can arrive at radically different political conclusions.
A developmental framework for making sense of some of the cultural upheaval we're living through.
A way to care deeply without handing politics control of your psychological life.
A map of how you want to engage with politics moving forward.
Who this is for, and who it isn't for
This project is for you if:
- You care a lot about politics.
- You follow the news closely.
- You're worried about what's happening.
- You find yourself checking, scrolling, arguing, or thinking about politics more than you want to.
- You don't want someone telling you what political positions to hold.
- You're curious about psychology, worldview, culture, and why people see things so differently.
- You're willing to examine your own thinking, not just everybody else's.
This isn't for you if you want:
- A political strategy course.
- A debate club.
- A place to prove why your side is right.
- A weekly rundown of the news.
- A course designed to convince everyone to become politically moderate.
- A promise that everything happening in the world is secretly fine.
I've followed politics for as long as I can remember.
And over the last several years, I've noticed something changing. Not just in politics, but in my relationship with politics.
I know what it is like to love this stuff, to be fascinated by it, to care about it, and also to feel how easily it can get inside your head. I have spent years in my professional work exploring thought, change, and human experience. I want to bring all of that knowledge to help you change your perspective on politics. Not to find the “right answer” but instead to change the way we look at politics itself so that we can stay engaged and not lose ourselves in the process.
The goal of this project is to answer this question:
How do we care deeply about what's happening without getting consumed by it?
That's why I'm doing this project.
Join The Politics Project
A four-month guided exploration of politics, psychology, media, worldview, and cultural change.
- 16 teaching weeks plus a Thanksgiving integration week
- Weekly teaching and experiential videos released Fridays
- Thursday live calls at 3 pm Eastern
- Call recordings included
- WhatsApp group for conversation between sessions
- Begins October 1st
A few natural questions
Do I need a particular political viewpoint?
No. The project is not designed to move you into a particular political position. It is designed to help you understand your relationship with politics more clearly.
Is this a Three Principles course?
The Three Principles understanding is one important lens, especially in the first Movement. But the project also draws from media research, political psychology, developmental theory, and cultural analysis.
Is this a Spiral Dynamics course?
No, though Spiral Dynamics and developmental thinking become important lenses in the second half. The point is not to memorize a model. The point is to see more.
Do I need to read The Post-Truth World?
No. Ken Wilber's work is one of the sources behind the project, and I may recommend reading for people who want to go deeper, but you do not need to read the book to participate.
Are we going to discuss current events?
Yes, but this is not a weekly news roundup. Current events may become material for inquiry, but the deeper subject is what is happening in us, between us, and around us as we engage with politics.
Is this meant to make me less engaged?
No. In fact, the question underneath the whole project is whether being less consumed might make us better at engaging: less reactive, less easily manipulated, and more intentional.
What if people disagree strongly?
That is part of the material, but the container matters. This is not a debate club or a place to perform certainty. We will be practicing curiosity, clarity, and honest examination.
Is this a “both sides” course?
No. Understanding how people arrive at different worldviews does not require pretending every factual claim, political action, or moral position is equivalent.
What if I can't attend every Thursday?
Calls will be recorded, so you can catch up if you miss one. The live conversations will be valuable, but missing a week does not mean falling out of the project.
How much time should I expect each week?
Plan on watching the weekly teaching and experiential videos, trying the takeaway work during ordinary life, and attending or watching the Thursday call.
You don't have to choose between looking away from politics and being swallowed by it.
None of us knows exactly what this period will look like when somebody writes its history fifty or a hundred years from now. But you are here now.
You can understand more. You can see more clearly. You can participate intentionally. You can care tremendously. And you can still have a life.
The goal isn't to care less.
It's to be consumed less.