We were so spoiled.

We were so spoiled.

I made my oats with kefir and blueberries this morning and complained about the rot found on many of the berries. The fact that I have blueberries in March is ridiculous from a ecological and economical perspective. Growing up in Nebraska I rarely had blueberries because they did not grow there. They may have occasionally shown up at the grocery store, but their cost reflected their rarity. My frugal parents would skip the store blueberries in favor of the homegrown strawberries and raspberries we had in summer. But today I expect blueberries to be easily accessible, cheap, and free from rot. This does reflect that I now live in a state where berries grow widely and that I have a been spoiled by an infrastructure and global trade environment that made blueberries from other countries show up in my store with relatively low prices and long shelf lives.

The signs of disruption first showed up in the pandemic. During that time we all made sacrifices and if berries were not easily available or were slightly more expensive or lower quality, I bit the bullet. I had confidence that this disruption would be followed by a return to the previous well-working system. I was wrong.

In adult learning we require something called a discrepancy to begin the learning process. A discrepancy is that niggling feeling that what we are directly experiencing is not consistent with our overall structure of things we hold to be true. The structure starts out as our ‘lifeworld’. These are the truths that were instilled in us in our earliest years; the beliefs of your caregivers, the social structure you experienced as ‘family’, the larger truths of the culture you were raised in, the neural patterns built in rapid-fire exposure to an overwhelming new reality of early childhood.

The lifeworld is molded by new skill development, an expanding social circle, and whatever formal education is available in the society in which we live. Some of this modeling will break down lifeworld neural connections, for example when a child learns that the parents have been playing Santa. This is a big enough discrepancy and is also consistent with the more concrete reality being established in the school-aged child. But much of our learning during these years will instead be integrated into the neural structure of our lifeworld. For example, when a child learns that the Earth is round. While they may not have experienced the world as a round object, instead picturing it as the flat ground they walk on, the visual of the globe helps expand the idea of the world beyond just the ground that the child walks on, and this new reality can be incorporated into the child’s understanding of the world without entirely breaking down the previous neural structure.

This type of learning continues, with modifications based on emerging developmental stages, throughout adolescence and arguably into early adulthood. There will continue to be reconstruction of neural pathways when large enough discrepancies occur. (Consider the rapid reframing of economics when you get your first teenage paycheck.) But the bulk of learning will be the methodical expansion of the lifeworld by adding data to or modifying concepts.

By adulthood, our neural pathways are well-established, and the lifeworld remains at the core of our thinking. It is what most people think of as ‘common sense’. Those ideas we hold so sacrosanct as to interpret them as universal truths that everyone must ‘just know’. In reality, though, these commonsense ideas often have biased or skewed components because they were from imperfect sources or through imperfect methods. In Galileo’s time it was ‘common-sense’ to consider Earth at the center of solar system. This view was informed by the church and the idea that the Earth orbited around the sun instead was blasphemous. Science refuting religious truth was so hard to accept that Galileo was sentenced to death for his scientific hypothesis. This is so different from our world view today that thinking is almost opposite. A religious proclamation that refutes scientific law is seen as antiquated and incorporated into our thinking as a myth or metaphor for a larger truth.

The well-established neural patterns of adulthood are what allow us to get through our incredibly busy and complex lives. Most food decisions are made unconsciously based on habit and environmental cues. This is why behavior change is difficult. We suddenly must spend cognitive energy on a process that has been automated for years. That cognitive spend takes away from other cognitive processes such as work and scheduling, leading to feelings of overwhelm and often a return to previous habits that allows us to go back to the cognitive spend that is comfortable.

I learned much of this while working on my doctorate in education leadership. As part of that process, I was asked to confront a bias, to name a time when my lifeworld was so incompatible with my lived reality, that previously named discrepancy, that I had to breakdown established neural pathways, literally had to change my mind, and rebuild new structure to incorporate the new truth of my current reality. I wrote about my experience of moving to Los Angeles from Nebraska when I was 23. I grew up surrounded by media about ‘gang violence’ in the black communities of LA. I was anxious about being outside on my own when I first moved there, and I remember wondering where all the black people were. (I apologize for the offensiveness of this thinking. I deeply appreciate the DEI work I did during my graduate studies. I realize how much bias goes on in my thinking and how freeing it is to recognize and rebuild my thinking instead of cowering in uniformed thought.)

When confronted with a Los Angeles that was more diverse that I could have imagined with my Nebraska lifeworld background I had to tear down the concept of gang world Los Angeles. This was not ‘Boyz in the Hood’, it was a megalopolis with so much to experience I could spend a lifetime there and not see all it had to offer. While there were black people, there were more Hispanics, middle eastern, and Asians then I could have known. I was a minority suddenly, and instead of being scary, it was exhilarating. I loved the rule breaking that happened on a daily basis as I explored the city and met people from all walks of life who were friendly, welcoming, beautiful, and warm. I know this new framework that I built during my years in LA has its own flaws, I can’t help but think that it made me a much better person. Not because my bias about the black community in LA got turned on its head, but because I could now see the bias informing the thinking of many.

What does all of this have to do with my blueberry problem? I was wrong about the pandemic being the disruption. The pandemic came at a perfect time to act as a confounder to interpreting how the divisiveness in our country was impacting, and entirely changing, the systems I had previously interpreted as set in stone, inviolable, so valid as to be a part of society going forward in perpetuity.

This was a bias fostered by my optimist father. He was part of the old guard generation that saw our system of government as a behemoth build of stone. Despite the wild changes caused by technology and declaring corporations to be people, he believed that systems changed in small steps because they were too big to be overthrown. ‘Too big to fail’ comes to mind as one of those moments in history that should have shown me what was coming.

This bias allowed me to use the pandemic as an explainer to changes in systems that should have caused a much larger discrepancy. I knew that the first Trump administration had soiled the economy and allowed the pandemic to get out of control. I knew the pinch that we experienced during the Biden administration was caused by terrible economic policy playing out in real time. I know the spread of misinformation was fostered and encouraged by the Trump administration and it led to a deepening of the fracture that ultimately resulted in an insurrection. But the insurrection failed, and we managed to pull back to reason for a brief four years. Despite the red flashing lights, by stability bias, and chaos fatigue, let me pretend that when the pandemic ended, so would the change, the upheaval, the frightening new reality that was unfolding.

But here we are. I pay a ridiculous price for my blueberries and know that soon I will have to give them up because they will not be available at all. I’ve stopped buying eggs and am stockpiling oatmeal, rice, and beans. I wake up each morning and wonder when the jack boots kicking in immigrant doors will shift toward those who have the audacity to dissent. I hesitate to write essays like this one, fearing it could put a target on my back. And still in the back of my head my dad shakes his head and gives me a look that says ‘you’re so naïve, good will prevail’. I love you, dad, but hard times are ahead, and it will not play out only in the grocery store. There will be hunger, there will be fear, there will be heartache, and there will ultimately be bloodshed. It’s time to overcome the ‘good will prevail’ bias and steel ourselves for what is coming.