That one sentence in the banner, that’s…
The very heart of my life.
It took me years to grow into it, but I’m here now and so thankful that I am.
Why does it matter to “feel and fight”?
Because this human species of ours is in terrible trouble. And…
In deep despair about itself.
So many countries around the world are taking a hard right turn into “authoritarianism.” Which is a big, scary word that simply means giving up on yourself. It means self-abandonment. It means you turn your decision-making over to one leader or a small group of ruling elites.
And then you obey the orders issued by these people who don’t care about you and never did and never will. And you do that because you’re finding it too hard to care for yourself.
For example, my own country, the United States, the most powerful country in the history of the world, is self-destructing.
How did it come to this? In the 2024 election, as with many before it, the biggest block of voters was those who did not vote.
So who really won the election? None-of-the-above. Or we could say resignation won. Or hopelessness.
And then there was a key block of voters who despair-voted for Republicans because they felt the Democratic Party had abandonned them.
When I look at the state of the world, what I see is humankind sinking deeper into despair by the day. And I hate despair. I hate it because…
It’s a terrible enemy.
It traps us and shuts us down.
It takes from us everything that makes us a blessing to the people in our lives.
It’s a global dementor hell-bent on sucking out our souls.
What’s the antidote?
First, we need to feel for ourselves. We need to feel just how scared we really are. We need to feel just how angry we are to be in such trouble. Trouble so deep that we’re facing the very real possibility of extinction.
And we need to feel deeply into the part of us that refuses, absolutely refuses, to surrender to the defeat of despair.
Second, we need to take action. And this matters because despair doesn’t just shut down feelings. It casts a spell over us that makes us believe we’re helpless. But we’re not.
We need to fight for ourselves and…
For the people we care about.
For what we believe in.
For the way we want people treat each other.
For the way we wish the world could be.
And we need to know that…
Feeling for ourselves is taking action.
In and of itself, it’s a way of fighting for ourselves.
In the banner sentence there’s this phrase: “more deeply.”
Which brings us to the hard part.
When I say, “the more deeply we feel for ourselves,” I don’t mean just a little bit deeper. I mean seriously deeper. Feeling all the way down to the bottom of who we are. All the way down into the human operating system that’s in our genome and that runs so much of human behavior.
Most people don’t want to go this deep. And I don’t blame them, because down at the bottom of our OS you come face to face with the source of human evil and it can shake you to your core.
But for me, going deep, doesn’t just scare me…
It makes me mad.
And I’m glad it does. Because the way I see it, we didn’t ask evolution to make us the way it made us. We didn’t ask for evil to be so easy and love to be so hard. We didn’t ask for the us-versus-them divisiveness that comes from our tribal past and is still very much with us. We didn’t ask for the ugly brutality that’s deeply rooted in our tribal nature.
I believe that…
In the darkest place we find the deepest compassion.
This means that the more deeply I come to understand what evolution has done to us, and continues to do to us, the more it makes me want to fight for myself, and for all of us.
And really, if we don’t care for ourselves deeply, really deeply, why would we ever fight for ourselves as fiercely as we need to?
When I talk about fighting for ourselves…
I’m first and foremost talking about love.
Not the conventional, ordinary version. I don’t want us to settle for that. Instead I’m on a mission to upgrade love, because…
We can make of love something way better than the default evolution gave us.
I understand that taking on this mission is a big challenge. I understand a lot of people don’t want anything to do with it. I get that. I do, because this challenge asks a lot of us. But then…
It gives back so much more than what it asks.
How did I get here? How did upgrading love become my life’s purpose? It started in childhood.
As a kid I was taught by my church and my family that I was unlovable. There was nothing I believed more deeply than this, but nothing troubled me more.
So I became obsessed with love, and kept trying to find a kind of love that might include me. I went to therapy, I read dozens of how–to books. Still, by midlife I had failed. I hadn’t been able to make an intimate relationship work long-term, so I was deep in despair about myself.
But then I got surprised.
I was reading my fourth book in a row about human evolution, when I had this thought: Since we humans are developmental beings that means human love is developmental.
Which means we can upgrade it. And this question came to me…
“What if we decide to ask more of love than we’ve ever asked of it?”
And now I had a mission. A life mission. And it was more me than anything else had ever been.
This mission has guided me ever since. It motivated me to do some very hard work on myself, which turned me into who I’ve become. And as hard as that work was I’m thankful for it, because now in my old age I can say I love myself. Not as an aspirational wish, but as a matter of fact.
Of course I don’t feel this love all day every day, but I have my moments. Quite a few of them. And this is a very long way to come from that little boy who was taught to despise himself.
If you want to know more about me, check out my books below, because who I am in my writing is very much who I am in real life. Except for one thing. In person I’m a lot more playful.
–Rich Snowdon
The mission to upgrade our love is as big a challenge as we humans have ever taken on. Personally, I’m crazy about it. It’s given me what I needed, it’s pulled my life together, it’s brought me to a kind of self–love I never experienced before. It means the world to me, but…
That’s me and it might not be you.
So let me give you a warning. This is not an easy–step project. Not even close. It’s gutsy. And it’s got a dark side.
To upgrade love we have to get behind the scenes of conventional love. We have to go down to the bottom of the human operating system. And when we do, we come face to face with the source of human evil. And this can shake you to your core.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know any way around this. There are so many blessings that come with the upgrade mission, and this book is filled with them. But we don’t get them for free. Yet in the darkest place we find the deepest compassion. For ourselves and for each other.
Where does this compassion come from? It comes from the fact that we didn’t ask to be made as we are. We didn’t ask for evil to be so easy and love to be so hard.
When we understand this, we get to feel for ourselves more deeply than we ever have, and then fight for ourselves like never before.
This was my first book and I’m still very fond of it. It cost me the most to write both in terms of time it took and in terms of the personal changes I had to go through to be able to write it.
My Asking book is the sequel to this one. I brought over whole passages and then added a lot of new material. But the most important difference between the two is perspective…
In my Love book, I started with the death of hope and then showed how upgrading love is the best way to respond to that death and defend ourselves against despair.
In my Asking book, I start with upgrading love for its own sake, the power of it, the blessings that come with it. Then secondarily I talk about how the human operating system has turned against us and is killing our hopes for a future as it marches us down the road to extinction.
I’m hoping that my Asking book makes the mission to upgrade love more accessible.
I’m deep into writing this book and will finish it by November 1, 2025, at the latest, but probably a good bit earlier. I’ll post it as soon as it’s done.
I remember back in the days when I was a sacrificial–savior activist, people would give me a pat on the back and thank me for the work I was doing. But almost no one wanted to live like me.
Activists are known for being dragged–down burnouts. Not very appealing.
But if we were going to have any chance to save the world, we’d need the great majority of people, masses of people, to be attracted to activism. We’d need them to look at us activists and be jealous of how we live, not be repelled.
We’d want them to see activists as people with deep, rewarding relationships, both with colleagues at work and with their loved ones at home.
So in this book, I focus on activists treating themselves and each other way better than what’s typical. I talk about replacing the Sacrificial–Savior Operating System with the much kinder and much more powerful Deep Nurturance Operating System.
Instead of just giving you bullet–point lists of how–tos, I give you detailed dialogues so you can see the principles of nurturance in action in relationships.
Most of the dialogues in this book, even though they deal with very serious issues, are upbeat, and sometimes even fun.
This book is mostly finished and I’ll be posting it by May 31, 2025. Or with a bit of luck, earlier.
This is a short book designed to help writers play their way into a deeper love of writing.
What inspired me was reading stories about kids in play therapy. I love these stories. I just love them.
I’m not talking about the kind of therapy that stays on the surface. What inspires me is the deep kind play therapy, the kind where the therapist uses play to help kids deal with the trauma of abuse and neglect and the daily struggles of living in a dysfunctional family.
Because it goes deep, because it takes on the toughest issues, I call this primal–play therapy.
And I found it to be contagious. Primal play started showing up in my writing, like a puppy who wouldn’t leave me alone, “Come on, let’s have some fun.”
LET’S TALK
I’m inviting you to
a free hour of in-depth conversation with me.
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COACHING
In the coaching I do, you get to
feel for yourself then fight for yourself.
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CONTACT and COMMENTS
I’d love to hear from you. I really would.
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