Welcome to the Machine: How Modern Life Keeps Us From Living a Meaningful Life, why Regular Coaching Doesn't Help, and how to Rethink Coaching so it Does Help

I’m writing this article on a train to Lviv (Ukraine), where I’ll visit a friend and make some memories.

I lived in Ukraine between 2019 and 2024. I was there when the war broke out on February 24, 2022, and only left the country for good in April 2024.

Spending a lot of time in a country at war changed how I look at life and at what I do.

• I stopped putting more time and energy into stuff that doesn’t matter beyond what’s strictly necessary.

• I stopped putting off the stuff that does matter to me. Like spending time with people I love.

• I started spending more time and energy on following my bliss—turning my unlived life into my actual life.

On this Substack, I already talked about why it’s so hard to follow your bliss and live your unlived life and why being put face-to-face with your mortality can snap you out of that.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I, as a coach, could use this insight to help people live their unlived life—without them having to put themselves in danger.

In this previous article, I argued that the ultimate reason why we’re constantly distracting ourselves from our mortality and our unlived life is the loss of an overarching, mutual narrative that holds our culture and society together.

There simply isn’t a compelling story anymore that is bigger than our individual lives and in which we can play an engaging role so that we become symbolically immortal as a part of that story.

Today, instead of a compelling, self-transcending story, we got the machine. We’re cogs and wheels in a massive machine that has no purpose other than to keep on existing and increase its power. Humans are reduced to a function within that machine.

Life no longer lives: How we turned life into a lifeless machine

There’s a quote by Iain McGilchrist that sums up how we got here:

“The model we choose to understand something determines what we find.”

What’s the model we choose to understand ourselves and the world around us? It’s the machine, as McGilchrist argues in an article here on Substack:

“Everywhere we liken everything, the world, nature and ourselves, to the machine. The machine is the tool of the left hemisphere and its raison d’être, power.”

• If we use the machine as the metaphor to understand ourselves, we’ll see ourselves as nothing but biological machines.

• If we use the machine as a metaphor to understand how human relationships and societies work, we’ll build a society machine.

The machine as a metaphor is so attractive to us because we live in a culture dominated by the left brain hemisphere’s view on the world.

To understand this, you need to be familiar with McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, so here’s a little primer:

The hemisphere theory says that the two hemispheres of the brain relate and attend to the world in fundamentally different ways.

The left hemisphere focuses on detail, precision, and control. It breaks things down, categorizes, and helps us manipulate tools or language. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, sees the bigger picture. It’s attuned to context, relationships, nuance, and meaning.

McGilchrist suggests that a healthy mind relies on both modes of attention, but with the right hemisphere leading.

However, modern culture often overvalues the narrow, analytical perspective of the left, while neglecting the more holistic, integrative vision of the right.

So the left hemisphere created the machine.

And that machine is sucking our sense of aliveness right out of us.

One way it does that is by distracting us from our mortality.

Because the machine doesn’t like death.

The machine fears death, because death is the ultimate loss of power and control.

The machine was created by the left hemisphere of the brain, and control and power are all the left hemisphere (and therefore the machine) care about.

The problem with that is that death and life belong together, and the more intense you feel one, the more intense you feel the other.

That’s why you need to face your mortality if you want to live your unlived life, as I’ve argued in my article Dying to Be Alive.

You’ll only find the life that makes you truly come alive when you face the ultimate fear – death.

As McGilchrist puts it in a recent interview with Paul Kingsnorth:

“The opposite of life isn’t death, the opposite of life is the machine.”

And so the machine does everything to banish any reminders of death, and to keep our minds off death—and therefore, off our bliss and our unlived life.

What does that have to do with coaching?

The machine, created by the left hemisphere, is the context for what we do.

It’s the epistemological basis for how we see things and how we choose to do things.

This includes coaching.

My argument is that the way coaching is typically done is a product of the machine as well.

And for that reason, it perpetuates our way of distracting ourselves from our mortality, our bliss, and our unlived life.

Most coaching is focused on our work life and on optimizing our performance. Tellingly, one of the foundational texts of modern coaching is called “Coaching for Performance”.

And here’s how the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the largest coaching association in the world, defines coaching:

"Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential."

It’s all about maximizing results, getting things done, getting results, and reaching goals. The client sets the goal he wants to reach, and the coach’s task is to help them get there.

Sure, getting things done, reaching goals and getting results are important—I won’t debate that.

But what I will debate is that those are the things that matter most.

What matters most is not getting results it’s being in alignment with what you care most about so that the results you get actually matter.

Just like the right hemisphere needs to lead the left hemisphere, being needs to lead doing.

It’s so easy to fall into a way of life where you’re just doing and working towards a goal and never look left or right—or stop to ask yourself if the goal you’re working towards is really what you want and what matters to you.

That’s why I believe that if the goal is to help people live their unlived life, this default way of coaching is not good enough.

Before I explain what I believe a new kind of coaching could look like, let me make one thing clear: I’m not trying to put other coaches down here. I know many coaches and they are amazing people who want the best for their clients. And coaching for results does have its place.

What I’m saying is that coaching needs to evolve if the goal is to help people live a life that feels truly alive. Focusing only on results is not helpful here.

So we need a new way of coaching… but what would that look like?

My hunch that the way we coach isn’t good enough anymore was reinforced recently by an article on re-thinking coaching (the article is in German, but Google Translate does a decent job).

The author of that article explains that modern people are living in a constant state of alienation—disconnected from everything that makes life come alive and worth living. This to me sounds very similar to McGilchrist’s description of the machine.

To get out of that disconnected state, the author invokes the concept of resonance, referring to the work of Hartmut Rosa.

Resonance means being in a co-creative relationship with the world. The individuum and the world affect and transform each other. It means being in a dialogue with the world.

This is the essence of an orientation to the world in which the two brain hemispheres are in balance.

Why is that orientation important?

Because we can’t be in alignment with what matters most to us if we’re not in resonance with the world.

Let me explain:

Resonance means being in dialogue with the context we’re in—our body, the world around us, the people around us.

This matters because we don’t choose what matters to us. We are drawn to whatever matters to us!

You could say that they are calling out to us, and it’s our choice to answer that call or to ignore it.

This is what Joseph Campbell means when he talks about the call to adventure in the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell says to follow your bliss—that is just another way of saying to live your unlived life.

But how do you find your bliss?

You find it through being in resonance. You need to listen to what the world (or the universe, or God—choose whichever term you like best) has to say to you.

You need to listen to what’s calling out to you—what tries to attract you.

How do you do that?

You do it through your body, because your body is the most intimate connection with the world.

It’s the first most important level of resonance. When you hit on your bliss, when you find your mission, you feel it in your body—not in your head!

The body has its own intelligence that is bigger than the head’s intelligence. That intelligence is called intuition, and it alone is capable of picking up on the things that call out to you.

I recently watched a video by Philip Sheperd in which he explains that same idea:

So a coach helping someone live their unlived life needs to work with the body as well and help his client be in resonance with the body.

If the goal is to build a meaningful life, we need to open and hold space for the things that matter to us to come forth.

We must not focus on results too early.

What are some of the tools for this kind of coaching?

We need to expand how coaching is done.

We need to give our coachees practices (things you do regularly so they become a way of BEING) that bring their hemispheres in balance and that create resonance.

If you’re asking about specific techniques, River Kenna came up with a great list of such practices, among them:

• Alexander Technique, which is much more about awareness than it is about how you sit or stand, as Michael Ashcroft suggests.

• Specific types of meditation (open awareness meditation and somatic meditation)

• Julia Cameron’s program “The Artist’s Way”

• Improv theater

Three things I’d like to add are:

• Existential coaching, that is coaching that deals primarily with the human condition and existential problems like death, anxiety, authenticity, and so on.

• Embodied writing, expressive writing and green writing.

• Embodiment practices such as this one.

In essence, coaches need to be facilitators of awakening from the machine. Facilitators of awakening from the dream that is our myopic, left-hemisphere-dominant culture, and of entering resonance.

I don’t see many coaches who use this approach to coaching.

But personally, I’m deeply convinced that this points in the direction of the next evolution of coaching.

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Other ways I can help you: If you have a feeling that you were meant for more, but you’re struggling to make that unlived life real, I’d be more than happy to help you. If you’re interested, I invite you to book a free 30-minute discovery call.

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