Welcome to 150 Dunbar Street
This is a journey to discover how to better live in an exponentially connected world.
Welcome to Neil Barnes’s Substack. In this hyper-connected world people feel anxious and isolated. In response, bi-weekly I’ll post a short read on meaningful connection and how we can achieve it.
My North Star is connection that helps us express, belong, grow, and find purpose. My compass is our intrinsically networked nature. My maps and tools, a plethora of topics including neuroscience, technology, relationships, evolutionary biology, and non-ordinary states.
As a free subscriber you’ll receive all I have to offer.
150
"the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” - Robin Dunbar
Dunbar's number is a suggested limit to the number of people we can maintain quality relationships with. Relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.
I’ve been fortunate enough to live and work outside of my native UK, and on my travels make friends all over the world. Although maintaining 150 quality relationships has always been beyond me, I can only imagine this happening in a tight-knit community, a village of peers and loved ones.
It is this quality of connection that resonates as vital to belonging and is the forcing function of 150 Dunbar Street.
Me
I’ve worked in finance, IT, education, governance, and psychology. I’ve read on almost every topic I can imagine (including huge amounts of fiction). I have several degrees and a lot of life experience. The thing I am most proud of are my relationships. My friends, family, and intimate other.
I read to learn. But I write to organise my thoughts. In the last few years I’ve written a number of blogs just for myself, shared a few articles with close friends, and burnt through half a dozen Twitter profiles. I knew I was seeking something and about 2 years ago a thread began to emerge.
One end of this thread is the experience of being an individual, the other, of being inseparable from everyone and everything else. This thread appears in the context of a hyper-connected world with diminishing returns on the quantity of connections. The thread is the human condition drowning in too much noise and a lack of signal.
Why Now
I have spent the last 2 years deepening my understanding of networks, cognition, meaning, psychology, neuroscience, psychedelics, and relationships. The thread has grown, vibrated, resonated, and now has my full attention. I started this Substack to explore my thoughts, experiences, and ideas on what it means to be an intrinsically networked individual. A node that cannot be disconnected.
My intent is to use this Substack to document a journey. My North Star is connection that helps us express, belong, grow, and find purpose. My compass is our intrinsically networked nature. My maps and tools, a plethora of topics including neuroscience, technology, relationships, evolutionary biology, and non-ordinary states.
This is a journey to discover how to better live in an exponentially connected world.
In the last year I built an ecosystem of practices to steady myself and make meaningful growth a part of my life. I will share personal revelations and objective analysis of all that I have learned, and continue to learn.
Invitation
My invitation to you is to follow my journey by subscribing, and if you wish, join me by commenting and sharing. Along the way I will be experimenting, learning, and making mistakes. I feel the value from this comes from sharing, and listening to what you think.