Free Nine Realms Institute Training
Above. Within. Between. A free fourteen-part training about the growing distance between power and ordinary life, the self we perform and the person underneath, and being connected to everyone while somehow feeling less connected to anyone.
Something has moved further away
People often describe what is happening as stress, polarisation, loneliness, distrust or social media damage. All of those may be true, but they can also be symptoms of something larger.
There is a gap between the institutions making decisions and the people living with them. There is another gap inside us, between the person we have learned to present and the quieter, messier human being who has to live behind the presentation. Then there is the gap between us: thousands of points of digital contact, constant commentary, endless access to other people, and a peculiar shortage of being properly known.
The Gap grew out of the questions behind my Strangers books, but it became a training because these are not merely political or cultural questions. They get inside identity, relationships, belonging, anxiety, authority and the way we understand ourselves.
This is an attempt to look at those distances without reducing them to one villain, one ideology or another cheerful instruction to switch your phone off and go for a walk.
The three gaps
The fourteen parts move through three related forms of disconnection. They overlap because, inconveniently, human beings do too.
The increasing distance between authority and lived experience: institutions, systems and decision-makers operating through abstractions while ordinary people deal with consequences in actual kitchens, jobs, streets and families.
The distance between who we are and who we have learned to present. Roles, expectations, public identity, adaptation and the difficulty of knowing what remains when the performance has been rehearsed for years.
The strange social condition in which we can belong to tribes, audiences, feeds and networks while losing some of the slower skills involved in being present with a real person who cannot be blocked, muted or reduced to a profile.
The point is not to romanticise some imaginary past in which everyone knew their neighbours, politicians were wise and nobody ever lied about themselves. Human beings have always been complicated. The machinery surrounding that complication has changed.
Becoming more real
At some point the useful question becomes how much contact with reality, yourself and other people can be restored.
That does not require withdrawing from society, deleting every app or refusing to participate in institutions. It does require noticing when representation has replaced contact and when belonging has begun costing more of you than it gives back.
Start The Gap
Enter your details and The Gap will be added to your NRI access.
No payment details are required. This is the full free training rather than an introductory fragment designed to become useful only after you pay for something else.
Take it slowly. Some of the questions are social, some personal, and some become uncomfortable precisely because the dividing line between the two is not particularly tidy.
Above · Within · Between
The starting point is to become a little harder to separate from reality, from yourself and from the human being standing in front of you.
