Adaptive AF
You adapted your way in. You can adapt your way out.
I recently sat down with Dan Ackers from The Adaptive Human for a Substack Live conversation. Watch it here. What started as a discussion about his publication name turned into something I’ve been processing ever since. This article is what that conversation inspired me to write.
I remember the day like it was yesterday. It happened almost 13 years ago.
What started as an entry-level job turned into a career with the goal of reaching the top. Then, one day, almost out of the blue, it hit me.
I cared more about disappointing my boss than my wife.
Somewhere along the way, without choosing it, I had organized my life around a career. I couldn’t see it then. I was so lost in this story that I found ways to justify my ambition as a means to provide my family with a good life. And somehow, what actually mattered had quietly become secondary.
I didn’t decide that. I would never have decided that.
So how did I get there?
That question changed the trajectory of my life. It’s also the same question underneath the conversation Dan and I were really having.
We are adaptive AF.
I mean that as a compliment and a warning.
Adaptation is our greatest asset and also, when left unexamined, our greatest liability. Most of us never examine it because we don’t know we’re doing it. We’ve become so identified with it, we just think it’s who we are.
Here’s what’s actually happening.
Your body conserves energy by automating what gets repeated. Every repetition strengthens the pathway. Neurons that fire together wire together. Do something enough times, and the system stops asking whether it should. It just does it, faster, more efficiently, and eventually without your conscious input.
This is the system working exactly as designed.
The system doesn’t distinguish between what’s good for you and what’s familiar. It optimizes for efficiency, not alignment. It doesn’t ask, “Is this still true?” It asks, “Have we done this before?”
The more you repeat something, the stronger it gets. The stronger it gets, the harder it is to change. At some point, you’re not making a conscious choice anymore. You’re just running a habit loop. The loop becomes a 12-lane superhighway built for speed and efficiency, a result of decades of repetition. When we decide to change, we are fighting the pull to get back to the familiar. The new habit is like building a dirt path, and we wonder why change feels so impossible.
This is the superpower at work. It built your competence, your instincts, and your ability to lead, perform, provide, and survive. Every strength you have is an adaptation that worked. You are, in a very real sense, an accumulation of everything you’ve repeated long enough for the system to automate.
You are the sum of your adaptations.
Here’s where it gets complicated.
Life kept coming. New relationships, new pressures, new seasons, new versions of yourself that the old programs weren’t built to handle. But instead of consciously adapting to meet them, most of us kept running the old loops. Same inputs, same outputs, producing the same results.
Because we’d already named those loops our personality, we never questioned them.
We convince ourselves that this is just who we are. We tell ourselves we’ve always been this way.
We take an adaptation stack built from years of repetition and survival, and we call it identity. We excuse it, we justify it, and we defend it.
The adaptations became invisible, running our lives from our blind spot.
This is drift. You became who you needed to become. Then one day, you realize the person you’ve become isn’t the person you want to be.
Dan found himself in a CEO role that needed a different man. I drifted into a version of myself who cared more about disappointing my boss than my wife. Neither of us chose it. Then, one day, you realize you’ve drifted into a gap between who you’ve become and who you intended to be.
Drift creates the gap. The gap between who you are and how you’re living. Between what you say matters and what your life reveals. Between the man everyone sees and the man you meet alone in the silence.
The gap has a felt sense. Dan called it something soft you can’t quite explain, or the little voice in the back of your head signaling that something is off before you have language for what it is.
I call it the Ache. Sometimes it’s pressure, irritability, or restlessness. Sometimes it’s the empty feeling after you get the thing you thought would finally make you feel different. Sometimes it’s just the quiet knowing that this can’t be it.
Something’s off. Something’s missing. You can’t always name it. But you feel it.
The gap is not the failure. The gap is the information. It’s our body’s way of telling us that we are no longer living in alignment with who we want to be.
So how do we use this superpower to consciously create the life we want?
That’s the question underneath the conversation Dan and I were really having. That’s the question underneath most of the conversations I have with men who have built successful lives and still feel like something essential is missing.
The answer starts with making the invisible visible.
You are not your adaptations. You are the one who can observe them. The moment you can observe a pattern, you are no longer fully inside it.
That’s where agency lives. When you become aware of your awareness, you can start to pay attention to your attention. When you can do that, you’re no longer driving from the backseat. You’re moving back into the driver’s seat.
You’ll drift back to the backseat. That’s not failure — that’s human. The work is noticing that you’re back there and returning to the wheel. Drift. Notice. Return.
If you unconsciously adapted your way into who you are right now, you can consciously adapt your way into the version that you want to become. That’s the capacity this work builds. I call it respond-ability.
Dan’s version of this was patience. He knew he needed to leave IT, but didn’t know what he was moving toward. He sat with that for two, maybe three years. He didn’t force a resolution; he let the question breathe. Writing surfaced eventually. That’s conscious adaptation — not forcing the answer, but staying present enough to recognize it when it arrives.
Mine looked different.
Four years ago, I lost my mind because someone cut me off in traffic. Lost it in a way that made my wife and kids uncomfortable. It caused a pretty big argument with my wife. And I’d done enough work by then to pull on that thread.
When a reaction is bigger than the moment demands, the moment is usually touching something deeper.
What I found underneath was the exact feeling I had as a kid when I got bullied. Somebody trying to get ahead of me, to cut me off, or trying to take advantage of me. I would fly into a rage that was completely uncharacteristic of who I thought I was.
I’ve found that most of my extreme reactions were protection mechanisms. I was protecting the part of me that didn’t feel enough. My ambition, my road rage, my arrogance, my ego, and the chip on my shoulder — all of it was armor.
Memory had become information instead of instruction.
Instruction says react. Information says “notice,” and “notice” is where the return begins.
Every time you notice the drift, something shifts. The gap closes a little. The latency shrinks, and the dirt path starts to form into a road.
I said it in the live without thinking about it: I’ve gotten a lot better at it.
Not finished, but better.
Dan said he doesn’t like to think about end goals. “More like a direction that I’m going in. I keep chasing that direction.” Still approaching, still oriented, and still moving.
I know what I was chasing.
“What I was really chasing was acceptance. But that acceptance can only come from me.”
No promotion, achievement, or approval was going to give it to me.
There are no external solutions to internal problems.
The question isn’t whether you’ve drifted. You have. I have. We all have. The question is whether you’ve noticed. And if you have, what are you willing to do about it?
The superpower didn’t stop working. You just stopped noticing.
If this landed, and you recognized something in the automation, the drift, or the Ache, you don’t have to figure out what to do with it alone.
I work with men who have adapted their way into lives that look right on the outside and feel wrong on the inside. We make the invisible visible. We trace the patterns back to where they started. And we build the capacity to consciously create the life you actually want.
If you’re ready to stop running the old programs and start driving,
send me a message.
We’ll start with a conversation and see where it leads.
That line is a powerful piece of advice - "When a reaction is bigger than the moment demands, the moment is usually touching something deeper" - Funny thing is, we can see it in others and don't see it in ourselves.
That's a sure sign something's not right.
The question is whether you’ve noticed. And if you have, what are you willing to do about it?
This gets back to self awareness. Which isn’t a given. You don’t really know you lack it, either. 😬