Remembering What’s Essential

“We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where there is no death, where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection… I pay tribute to the past as a resource that can serve as a foundation for us to revision and renew our commitment to the present, to making a world where all people can live fully and well; where everyone can belong.”
— bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

When I spoke with Soren Gordhamer about his new book, The Essential: Discovering What Really Matters in an Age of Distraction, it felt less like an interview and more like a reunion between two kinfolk—two fellow practitioners, if you will—who have, in our own ways, been asking the same question for years: How does one live wisely in a world that has forgotten what’s essential?

Soren’s journey—from working with incarcerated youth in New York City to launching Wisdom 2.0, and now turning his focus to the interface between AI and inner life—has been animated by a single, luminous inquiry: How do we live ancient wisdom in modern life? It’s a question that’s animated my work too, especially as I’ve watched the world grow noisier, faster, more disembodied.

One line from his book hovered over our conversation: “No change in our external world can ever satiate what is unresolved in our internal world.” And if we’re honest, isn’t that the paradox we’re all living with? We can automate everything but meaning. We can scroll endlessly and still hunger for depth. We can be praised and promoted, and yet still ache from stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, often in secret.

Soren doesn’t offer a self-help blueprint. He offers something more radical: a pathway to remembering that which matters. I often visualize that word as re-membering—bringing back together the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten, abandoned, or exiled in the pursuit of external success. The stories we carry—of being too much or too little, of being unworthy of mattering—will quietly run our lives until we name them, feel them, and release ourselves from their grip.

As I wrote in the introduction to my book Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong: “Re-membering the dismembered parts of ourselves, taking back that which was placed into our psychological shadows so that we may show up whole and authentic, as well as trustworthy and open.”

What struck me most about our conversation wasn’t Soren’s clarity, but his honesty. He told the truth about the hurt he’s carried and how it shaped his striving. He didn’t flinch from naming what he calls “the game”—the way the world rewards our curated identities while slowly starving our inner lives. His honesty was a radical act of re-membering and reunification with the dismembered parts of himself. He was brave enough to show up whole and authentic and therefore trustworthy.

In doing so, he also reminds us that we don’t need to reject technology to live with wisdom, but we do need to stop confusing attention with meaning, reaction with connection, and presence with performance. He goes further to point out that there is a deeper intelligence within each of us—a source of awareness, compassion, stillness. It has no social media following. This intelligence, this wisdom doesn’t care about your titles or your followers. It simply asks to be remembered.

So much of what we call progress asks us to forget who we are. But what if our task now is not to evolve as machines but to evolve as humans? Evolution through remembrance of the things that matter.

Not upgrading ourselves or even our consciousness, but “the art and act of remembering” our way to a place beyond death

I hope you enjoy this conversation with my new old friend, my kindred spirit, Soren. As you listen to it, hold on to this question: Amidst everything—in the middle of all that’s chaotic and painful about the world—what’s essential to your life? What truly matters, now? The art and act of remembering is not only the way to know ourselves, not only a way to renew our commitment to the present, but—through our memories—a way to sustain life itself. What is it in your life that needs to be re-membered? 

To me, this is what matters most of all.