NOTES ON THE STRANGE EXPERIENCE OF BEING ALIVE.
Andrew Adams writes about humans.
The things we do to be loved.
The identities we build to survive.
The lives we say we want.
The lives we actually choose.
The things we lose.
The things we become.
And all the strange, beautiful, heartbreaking things that happen in between.
Field notes from one human paying attention.
I HAVE SPENT A LOT OF MY LIFE WATCHING HUMANS.
Partly because I love them.
Partly because they confuse the hell out of me.
We want to be loved, then hide the parts of ourselves we are afraid someone might love less.
We say we want peace, then repeatedly return to the thoughts, people, and patterns that disturb it.
We want extraordinary lives, then become deeply attached to being comfortable.
We survive things we thought would kill us, then spend years learning how to actually live.
I am interested in that.
The contradictions.
The patterns.
The ways we protect ourselves.
The identities we build.
The stories we inherit.
The things we do when nobody is watching.
The things we know but refuse to admit.
Human Observations is where I write about those things.
Not because I have figured humans out.
I am one.
And I am paying attention.
Being Human
THE LIFE YOU KEEP AVOIDING IS STILL WAITING FOR YOU.
There is a version of your life you have been circling for years. You know what it looks like. You know what it would require. You have been very busy not choosing it.
THINGS I HAVE NOTICED ABOUT HUMANS.
Some are about leadership.
Some are about love.
Some are about survival.
Most are about the strange distance between who we are, who we pretend to be, and who we are becoming.
THE LIFE YOU KEEP AVOIDING IS STILL WAITING FOR YOU.
There is a version of your life you have been circling for years. You know what it looks like. You know what it would require.
YOU ARE NOT WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE. YOU ARE WHO YOU KEEP CHOOSING.
Identity is not a fixed thing you discover. It is a living thing you build, reinforce, and occasionally have to dismantle.
PEACE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF A HUMAN EXPERIENCE.
Most people are waiting for their circumstances to become peaceful before they allow themselves to be. That is not how it works.
SURVIVING IS NOT THE SAME AS LIVING.
A lot of people are very good at surviving. They have built entire lives around it. The problem is that survival is a strategy, not a destination.
THE PERSON LEADING THE COMPANY IS INSIDE THE COMPANY.
Unexamined patterns do not stay inside the leader. They become communication problems, cultural norms, and organizational reality.
MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT AFRAID OF LOVE. THEY ARE AFRAID OF WHAT LOVE MIGHT REQUIRE.
Being truly known by another person is one of the things humans want most and protect themselves from most aggressively.
NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS AN ESSAY.
Some observations arrive as a few thousand words.
Others show up as one sentence while standing in the shower.
Many people do not reject themselves. They edit themselves.
The achievement was never the thing they wanted. They wanted relief.
Some of you are calling it ambition when it is actually fear.
You can spend your entire life being accepted by people who have never actually met you.
Peace is not the absence of a human experience. It is the capacity to remain with yourself inside of one.
Eventually, the life you keep saying you want begins asking why you keep choosing something else.
THE BOOK OF HUMAN THINGS.
Human Observations is becoming something larger.
A collection of notes, essays, stories, questions, contradictions, and things I have learned from spending a lifetime being human and paying attention to other people doing the same.
There is no publication date.
There is no polished announcement.
The book is being written.
If you would like to know when there is something worth sharing, you can leave your email below.
I BASED ON LOGICSHOULD BE DEAD.
Andrew Adams is a writer, keynote speaker, and Executive Advisor.
Before any of those things, he is a human being who has spent much of his life trying to understand why people do what they do.
After surviving addiction, trauma, homelessness, and a life that should have ended differently, Andrew became interested in a question larger than survival:
What does it actually mean to live?
His writing explores identity, belonging, love, ambition, peace, leadership, suffering, responsibility, reinvention, and the complicated experience of becoming a person you can live with.
He lives, works, writes, and continues paying attention.
NEW OBSERVATIONS, DELIVERED DIRECTLY.
Andrew writes when he has something worth saying.
New essays, fragments, questions, and occasional updates from the work in progress.
KEEP LOOKING AROUND.
The observations are one part of the work.