Developmental Engineering
Psychological Development within Capitalism
A previous essay described developmental dilemmas, along with a concrete practice for overcoming them. They clarified the distinction between hard solvable problems and developmental problems. They showed that problems become developmental if you dig into them deeply enough, because they are embedded in human contexts shaped by psychological development.
However, those essays left an important question unanswered. If developmental problems are ubiquitous, which ones are worth prioritizing? You’re finite in space and time. It’ll never be possible to free yourself from all systematic errors in your cognition.
So then, what’s the overall process of psychological development when viewed as a whole, rather than one wall at a time?
More specifically, how can I develop the competence to navigate the process of psychological development deliberately, rather than leaving it to the shifting winds of “Fate”?
Why existing pathways don’t work for me
I’ve practiced various forms of Buddhism for years. I find deep wisdom and inspiration in the Bible, the Gita, and the overall Mahabharata. However, I primarily relate to them through a literary and metaphorical lens. I don’t look to them for scientific truths.
I see the value they provide to billions across the world. I also see the through-lines that cut across them. Nevertheless, they’re not existentially viable for me because committing to any of them evokes deep fears in my body. I’ve come to see wisdom with leaving these fears intact, but also the positive purpose of provoking me to find a better relationship to these traditions, that fits me. It’s cold out there, and I need a jacket. I’m not smart enough to tailor one from scratch fast enough before I die, but neither do I want to buy off the rack. I’m left with buying something off the rack, and developing the skill of altering it to fit my body.
Committing to a framework whose propositional truth claims (e.g. afterlife, heaven, rebirth, etc.) strain under the scrutiny of modern science frightens me because I risk intellectual dishonesty I’m unwilling to accept.
Deep devotional commitment to a guru (e.g. guru yoga) frightens me because I risk compromising my autonomy. There’s many instances of guru-student abuse which leave me wary.
Inhabiting a cosmology that doesn’t resonate with the deeper story I actually live inside frightens me because I risk feeling inauthentic, resulting in increased loneliness. Some practices don’t land for me not because the cosmology is bad or wrong, but because I live in a very different world (i.e. Capitalism) than the one in which they were invented centuries ago.
The rational fear of getting burnt by an open flame shouldn’t lead to a general prohibition on cooking food. The proportionate response is to develop conscious competence around wielding fire safely and effectively.
Yet the narrative I live inside (i.e. Capitalism, Science, Modernity, etc.) lack their own native pathways for development. I still yearn for growth and the cultivation of wisdom! I still face developmental walls and competing values.
I’m torn between my fears of committing to any single religious tradition and a genuine yearning for the personal transformation those traditions offer.
A very brief history of religion
Human beings are geared towards growth, even if it happens unconsciously. Humanity has gradually brought developmental patterns into consciousness. Sages and storytellers observed these patterns and codified them into myths and stories best fitted to their own time and place. The Hero’s Journey articulates a through-line running across many of these myths and stories across the ages.
Contemplative and spiritual traditions across civilizations took this much further by systematizing developmental patterns into extraordinarily precise frameworks and institutions. Examples include Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, various Tibetan Buddhist lam rims, Abhidharmakosa, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, etc. from the East, and traditions like Neoplatonism from the West.
These traditions operated through conscious competence, although embedded within specific cosmological frameworks and deeply interwoven with the cultural and political dynamics of their time. Their most sophisticated teachers had a deep, articulated understanding of developmental processes. They could diagnose where practitioners were stuck, and could prescribe specific interventions with relative precision. Most laypeople, and perhaps many of the clergy, lacked deep access to this conscious competence.
Many of these developmental traditions share striking structural similarities despite varying degrees of historical contact. This suggests genuine affordances inherent within human consciousness that different traditions discovered and activated. However, each tradition’s developmental principles are entangled with cosmological claims that may not be necessary for the mechanism of development to function. This entanglement makes it difficult both to compose across traditions and to integrate with the meta-stories of Capitalism and Science.
At the same time, I can’t easily “go backwards” into these traditions by saying that Capitalism is “bad” and that the religions are “good”. Capitalism has become the dominant religion in the world for a positive reason. A primary purpose of any religion is to give its adherents a mechanism for resolving the competing values that constitute each individual’s developmental walls. Capitalism allows individuals to flatten and quantify intangible value into money, which can then be used within markets to resolve competing values through exchange. It’s taken over the world because it enables faster, simpler, and far more decentralized trade-offs between competing values than any previous system.
However, the things I value most (e.g. love, meaning, belonging, growth, etc.) resist clean quantification. Reducing them to monetary terms often strips away the very qualities that make them meaningful. Similarly, Science provides extraordinary material understanding but can’t speak to questions of meaning, purpose and value.
I want to participate in a Way of Being that integrates Capitalism, Science and Development towards what’s Good, True and Beautiful, that’s actually existentially viable for me.
Conscious competence at psychological development
Unconscious incompetence means you don’t know what you don’t know. Conscious incompetence means you recognize what you can’t yet do. I don’t want either of these.
Unconscious competence means the skill has become second nature and no longer requires deliberate attention.
Conscious competence means you can perform the skill with deliberate attention and can articulate what you’re doing and why. The “what you’re doing and why” is critical, and makes it possible to disseminate the skill and to consciously improve it.
The conscious competence of traditional spiritual systems was largely context-specific to its place, time and culture. I can’t go back to the context-specific developmental pathways of traditional spiritual systems, and that ship has sailed. I can, however, cultivate conscious competence at psychological development that is composable with the best truths of these spiritual traditions. A prerequisite is to:
articulate the developmental affordances for the relevant practices across traditions without buying into their specific cosmology.
compose practices from different traditions based on what an individual needs at a given stage.
integrate this developmental work with the realities of modern life rather than requiring a withdrawal from them.
engage in “scientific” experimentation with an emphasis on “results”.
Every practice has a base, a method, and a result (inspired by this post by Charlie Awbury and David Chapman). The base is the practitioner’s lived experience, their patterns of interaction, their social milieu, and their existing developmental shape. The method is the specific thing one does with their body and mind. This could be a meditative technique, a mantra, a journaling practice, a visualization, an asana, etc. The result is the developmental outcome of the practitioner overcoming some systematic error in their meaning-making.
The translation of language offers a fitting analogy for what I’m pointing at here. Producing a word-for-word substitution across languages isn’t often the goal. Rather, the goal is to capture the original text’s nuance and to express it in the most natural way within the target language. Effective translation requires a subtle understanding of both source and target contexts. In that sense, the composition of developmental practices across traditions is more like skilled translation than transplanting an identical screwdriver from one toolbox to another.
The composition I’m describing here rejects the two extremes of McMindfulness, and the arrogant dismissal of existing traditions.
Some discomfort is likely irreducible within the process of psychological development. However, developing without conscious competence seems inefficient because you waste energy needlessly thrashing against developmental walls, or engaging with walls that aren’t actually a priority.
Participating in a Way of Being that integrates Capitalism, Science and Development towards what’s Good, True and Beautiful, that’s actually existentially viable for me, requires conscious competence at developing psychologically.
Aligning practices with purpose
The base/method/result framework described above captures the mechanism of each individual practice, but traditions are far more than an arbitrary collection of practices. They’re tied together through an embedded purpose, or through-line, which directs the trajectory of a practitioner’s development. For example, the practices within Theravada Buddhism aren’t somehow detached from the ultimate goal of achieving nibbana. Attempting to copy the base/method/result without understanding the underlying purpose risks dissonance between the practice’s original orientation and the practitioner’s actual aims.
I came to meditation through Theravada Buddhism. I gradually understood how vipassana worked in terms of base/method/result, and it made sense to me. However, the deeper I went into the practice, the more I experienced an unconscious resistance. My friction stemmed from a fundamental disagreement between Theravada’s embedded developmental endpoint and my own orientation. I want the capacity to participate in the world with the tone of non-attachment, but I don’t want to materially withdraw into a cave to achieve it. Vajrayana Buddhism (Dzogchen) has become the current best fit for me.
Composable conscious competence requires understanding how the practices function, what they were originally oriented towards, and whether that aligns with the practitioner’s preferred unconscious purposes. Therefore, bringing one’s unconscious purposes to consciousness is a prerequisite for developing conscious competence.
What is “purpose”?
I’ve written about development in terms of cultivating the capacity to navigate greater levels of nebulosity. This can often be reframed as the gradual overcoming of one’s systematic errors. However, humans are limited in space and time, so it’s not possible to overcome all possible systematic errors. That is, it’s not possible to develop “in general”. There’s always some underlying orientation which guides the trajectory of development.
A purpose is a through-line that captures the unity between psychological and physical behaviors at different layers of abstraction. Consider the following hierarchy:
The specific motor movements within my hand muscles involved with grasping a glass of water.
These can get “chunked” into groups of motor movements for the broader purpose of picking up the glass.
These can get chunked into the broader purpose of quenching my thirst.
This can get chunked into the broader purpose of being “present” on a first date.
This can get chunked into the broader purpose of growing deeper in a relationship with that woman.
This can get chunked into a broader purpose of experiencing the fulfillment of romantic love.
And so on. You get the idea.
Each level of analysis describes a “purpose” that organizes the mind and body underneath it. Purposes are not “out there” in the world, waiting to be discovered. They’re conceptual devices for organizing reality, providing clarity for what would otherwise appear as an overwhelming array of disparate actions and experiences. Different people may see different through-lines of purpose for the same behaviors, depending on their own developmental vantage point. With sufficient integration, it’s possible to track through-lines that cut across systems of people, rather than merely across the the lifetime of a given individual.
Different purposes create different affordances, opportunities, and possibilities for you to meet your various needs. For example, the purpose of “building technology that helps humans grow wiser” would present a very distinct set of developmental walls than “writing an incredible novel that inspires and delights people”. Each through-line of purpose creates both opportunities for flow (e.g. Vervaeke’s description of an insight cascade), and developmental challenges.
The pursuit of purpose is inherently developmental. Purpose-oriented action tends to prioritize foregrounding the specific competing values that need resolution to continue being “on purpose”.
The pursuit of purpose is not “optional”, only conscious or unconscious. Or as Jung put it, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”
A practice for articulating purpose
Some people can articulate what animates them, and a broader through-line of purpose, with relative ease. Others, like me, need help “sneaking up” on this purpose energy, often for the biggest goals in my life. It’s often easier to start with what states of consciousness I find deeply rewarding, and to use those as entry points for discovering the through-lines that run beneath them.
I’ve found Brian Whetten’s Ideal Scene exercise helpful for “sneaking up” on this purpose energy. It involves articulating a set of present-tense, positively-stated intentions for a given domain of life, and then looking for the through-line that runs beneath all of them. Here are some examples of intentions that have animated me as I understand the broader purpose running through my romantic life:
I’m peacefully surrendering into the profoundly deep knowing that I am seen, accepted and loved for who I am, without having to perform or prove anything, and my whole body is softening into that trust.
I’m courageously staying centered and honest through conflict with her, and feeling both of us grow closer and wiser on the other side.
I’m gratefully relying on her steady, grounded competence and showing up with my own steadiness in return.
Each intention has to be both believable and aspirational, and often has the structure “I’m [emotionally charged adverb] [active verb-ing] [with/in/through] [their quality or shared quality].”
Underlying all of these intentions is the master intention of “This or Something Better for the Highest Good of All Concerned”. This master intention orients purpose towards something larger than pure self-interest without prescribing what that larger thing must be. It sets the stage for what John Vervaeke would call reciprocal opening rather than reciprocal narrowing.
The Ideal Scene is provisional by design. It’s not a permanent life plan but a “good enough” starting point that can be refined through the developmental process itself.
The core loop of consciously undergoing development
The following loop describes the core mechanics for psychological development:
Articulate a provisional purpose. This can either be through an Ideal Scene or a Big Goal you already have access to.
Create small, safe goals that pull you towards that purpose. Translate the through-line of purpose into concrete, achievable goals that move you in its direction. These goals should be small enough to be actionable and safe enough that failure won’t be catastrophic, but meaningful enough that pursuing them will surface whatever developmental work is needed. These should be “Yes Yes Hell No” goals in Brian Whetten’s language.
Notice the developmental walls that emerge. Purpose-oriented goals trigger fear because they tend to go against the grain of existing habits. That is, they surface competing values that now need to be resolved. A core practice at this step is to identify whether a given problem is merely hard, or whether it’s developmental.
Resolve the developmental dilemma authentically. A core practice at this step is the one presented in my previous essay. Rather than heroically powering through the wall, you trace back through the fears, judgments, and pain to upgrade the stories underneath each side of the dilemma. This recalibrates your meaning-making system, changes your relationship to the wall and presents a “third choice” to the dilemma.
Refine your sense of purpose. Getting to the other side of the wall creates a state of flow, sometimes producing what Vervaeke would call an “insight cascade” where multiple previously stuck areas begin to move simultaneously. You take action from this expanded vantage point, and the new perspective may shift the way you relate to the purpose that oriented you towards the wall in the first place. Some aspects may feel more alive and vivid than before, and others may fall away as no longer relevant. You take this opportunity to sharpen your sense of purpose.
Repeat the loop with refined purpose. Each iteration of the loop compounds, bringing ever greater levels of peace, joy, love, and flow.
Purpose is transjective, as John Vervaeke puts it. It’s a real relationship co-created between you and your environment, and it’s neither purely subjective nor purely objective. Each iteration of the loop increases your sensitivity and ability to “find” through-lines of purpose with ever greater scope, such as lines of purpose that run through many people simultaneously.
Each step of this loop triggers fear. Articulating a purpose means committing to a specific direction while accepting that others will receive less attention. Setting goals invites accountability and the possibility of failure. Authentically engaging with a wall means unearthing the fears and pain underneath it. Doing developmental work invites you to change at a deep level. Participating on the other side of the wall is scary because the world looks different now, the old comforts are gone, and you can’t go back.
On the other hand, each step is deeply alive. Articulating a purpose generates substantial “clean” energy and direction that may not have existed before. Goals at your developmental edge produce a distinct quality of excitement that feel enlivening. Facing and accepting a wall often releases tension because it feels “real”, and getting to the other side often produces peace, joy, love, and flow. It invites a sense of spaciousness, gratitude, and renewed purpose that makes the next fear worth facing.
The conscious pursuit of psychological development is scary because it promises to deliver what you truly want. Once you’ve found what you truly want, the thought of losing it is unbearable. Having children often introduces depths of love to parents that they’d never experienced before. On the other hand, they often experience levels of fear they’d previously never experienced.
The more alive and purposeful your life becomes, the more you have to lose, and the more courage is required to continue. The only “solution” is to continue developing further.
Each step of the developmental loop can be augmented by practices from various contemplative traditions, depending on the circumstances of the practitioner. For example, the Ideal Scene can function like a mantra practice or a provocative vow practice; various energetic practices from Vajrayana Buddhism can be used to find and release fears, judgments, and pain. This specific articulation of the loop makes it easy to import and connect with practices across multiple traditions.
Towards developmental engineering?
I believe that the process of psychological development can be made more conscious, in a way that composes practices from various spiritual traditions. I also believe there should be people who specialize in exactly this kind of work. I’m tentatively calling them Developmental Engineers, although I’m still sharpening my thinking around this.
Developmental Engineers would help individuals identify which purposes are most alive for them, and would design tailored practices, tools, and containers to accelerate development towards those purposes as consciously, safely, and effectively as possible. They’d do all this with the composable conscious competence described above, while remaining attentive to the client’s broader social context. Once developmental processes have been brought into consciousness and somewhat systematized, it becomes possible to bring the tools of AI to bear on them. AI is poised to profoundly reshape knowledge work, and developmental engineering is no exception.
A developmental engineer is not a therapist. Therapists hold space for healing, trauma processing, emotional regulation, and many other functions broader than explicit developmental work, and sometimes prerequisites to it.
A developmental engineer is also not a generic executive coach. Executive coaching is broad, encompassing public speaking skills, structural management of organizations, and leadership communication. Many coaches provide valuable support, but their focus isn’t always on the systematic cultivation of psychological development.
A developmental engineer is not a spiritual teacher. Spiritual teachers often operate within a specific tradition and may prescribe purposes based on that tradition’s cosmology. In contrast, a developmental engineer won’t prescribe what purpose a client ought to have.
A developmental engineer may work in tandem with a client’s therapist, coach, and spiritual teacher, but their distinctive function is to afford the cultivation of conscious psychological development, oriented by the purposes most alive for the individual, using whatever practices and tools best fit that person’s situation.
I don’t know yet exactly what the day-to-day of a developmental engineer would look like, but it’s a question I’m deeply interested in.
Please drop a comment below or email me at varun@doubleascent.com if you made it this far and have any thoughts, questions, or feedback.