Dissociation is one of the body’s response to a trauma trigger. The body stores trauma. When the triggered trauma is too much for the body to hold, the consciousness of the human being leaves their trauma-triggered body and moves to their head. At such a point, the human being may feel numbed out and be unable to express what emotion is present in their body. Dissociation may cause a human to speak excessively or think incessantly - thinking and speech being two functions located in the head.

Dissociation is not just an event. I lived most of my childhood, adolescent and adult life completely disconnected and numbed out from my body.

Dissociation has its advantages. The concentration of consciousness in my head at an early age due to the trauma allowed me to excel at academics and get good grades in school. I believe the same is true of many men in tech, science and engineering. Breath is an indicator of consciousness. The shallower the breath, the more dissociated the individual. Many modern day philosophers and intellectuals are quite at discomfort in their bodies - you could gauge that by sensing into how calm their breath feels when you hear them talk. Slavoj Žižek is a prime example. There are other indicators of a person’s bodily discomfort. Shoulder tension pressing into the neck is very common amongst men in tech, cutting off the breath flow at the neck - eg. Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

I believe that dissociation is a widely present phenomenon in the tech industry. It’s a tricky phenomenon to track though. My own awareness about my level of dissociation emerged only after my repressed childhood trauma emerged. It’s one of those things that you have to partially cure in order to even see it. It’s a hard problem. Like tracking numbness in your body - numbness is due to underdeveloped neural pathways to parts of your body. Sensing their underdeveloped nature while the pathways are absent requires a very subtle level of perception. Personally, I started noticing something was off when a gym trainer would tell me to flex my core but I had no idea how to do that often leading to back pain when I did core workouts. It was because the neural pathways to my stomach were very underdeveloped because a lot of my numbness was in that region hiding the sexual trauma repressed in the pelvis and hips. The same numbness contributed to binge eating issues because food was the only thing I could send there to feel something. Over time, I started practicing holding my stomach with my bare hands as a way of developing my neural connection to my stomach. During the Ayahuasca ceremony when my very first memory of being masturbated by my perpetrator came up, all of the confusing cacophony of emotions - disgust, excitement, shame, confusion - were felt by me in my stomach and my young nervous system whooshed all those confused emotions away and draped them under a cloak of numbness to save me the trouble of processing those emotions. The ceremony helped me, thus, see the beginning of the numbness.

Dissociative tendencies were also the root cause of my tendencies to fall asleep everywhere - something I was attempting to solve as “sleep apnea”. My consciousness would leave my body, then sometimes also overwhelm my head and I’d start falling asleep.

All this background to share a couple of bold claims about Silicon Valley.

Undiagnosed widespread dissociative tendencies amongst humans (specifically men) in tech are at the root of tech ambitions to go to Mars and to live in a virtual metaverse (separate from but related to the crypto metaverse).

A consciousness that is constantly used to ejecting from the body and swimming around in the head, by extension, dreams up a desire to eject from the Earth and go to Mars (ironically, the planet most typically associated with the Masculine).

Only such a consciousness, disconnected from the body, can envision living in a virtual world and wonder if our existence is a video game simulation because both scenarios do not necessitate a functioning body. I’m fairly certain I’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg market VR as being an embodied experience. I can only shake my head at the level of disconnection one would need from one’s body to make such a claim.

So what’s the solution? Should all the tech CEOs do intentional psychedelic exploration? I don’t think that’d help. A consciousness that is not prepared to be with the body just ends up hallucinating fantasies on psychedelic trips (in my strong opinion, weakly held). Embodiment via cold exposure, dance, yoga, Vipassana and reduction of reliance on numbing mechanisms like alcohol (even “social drinking”), tobacco, weed, binging TV and video games is a two pronged strategy that worked for me.