Sitting on a raft, with a few family members, in the middle of the massive pacific ocean, I looked into the night sky to find the southern cross on the horizon…

...there it was… bright and beautiful… the beacon we desperately needed, to find our way home…

Thankfully, this was just a simulation I attended a few summers ago… not a real life survival scenario!!

The primary planetarium presentation and exhibit at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawai’i is called Wayfinders: Waves, Winds, and Stars.

We learned how ancient Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of open ocean without any modern instruments, and that some brave humans are trying to revive this practice!

Since long before that trip, I have been somewhat obsessed with finding my own way… not only by going off trail in the woods, or taking a new route home, but also in my life, career and relationships.

I have never been one to follow others or trust tech, for better or worse, haha.

Starting this business, and persisting through innumerable challenges, while staying on course with my mission and ethics (earth care, people care and future care), has been one long harrowing experience of wayfinding.

No one held the answers for me, no matter how long I looked or how hard I cried, because no one else had done this before. I had to find my own way to get here (and I did find a lot of great support along the way).

Many of the things I have encountered in life have been like that, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am an explorer and a seeker, like my ancestors.

And, I’m guessing you might be somewhat similar, Reader… at least maybe at heart.

The way this world is evolving has not made it easy to be an independent agent or critical thinker. It is not easy to find our own way, or even to feel that it’s safe or supported to do so.

There are no elders teaching us songlines and memory techniques; there are no rites of passage designed to help us hone the skills needed to get un-lost; there are no rituals that secure our place and purpose in these times.

This is part of the polycrisis - this massive amount of missing pieces.

And with AI here, providing “all the answers” to all our questions so eagerly and easily… it’s getting even harder to find the motivation to do the hard things that wayfinding requires…

As it turns out, this practice of wayfinding is critical to our survival as a species, maybe moreso now than ever.

According to Graham Lee, author of Human Being (get this book!!), multiple studies are showing that even simple things like GPS negatively impact our spatial memory and disable parts of the brain. Spatial thinking has been connected to vital cognitive functions like abstract thinking, imagination and even language.

In other words, we are already losing essential skills and brain cells to GPS (and other tech).

When we choose to hand our homework over to the “smarter kid” in the room, or let someone else lead us through the woods, we are giving up more than just the “earned good grade,” or the fun of bushwhacking through vines and spider webs first.

We are giving up a chance to grow our brain, expand our capacity, make real memories, and find our way if the leader falls or the teacher’s pet is sick, or hallucinating… (which is happening more and more often).

And what’s worse is that we are rapidly losing some of the most vital skills that make us human…

...skills that helped us survive against all odds for millenia…

...skills that may just be the most desired and highest paid skills in the world, soon, as a result of this tech-tsunami taking out most people’s creativity and cognition more rapidly than anything we’ve seen before.

But there's hope.

MIT Sloan’s EPOCH framework reveals uniquely human capabilities that enable humans to do work in areas where machines are quite limited. The acronym EPOCH stands for:

Our high capacity for sensory attunement, relationship, storytelling, creativity, adaptability, and other distinctly human skills are becoming even more valuable (because they are becoming more rare) as technology continues to weaken the parts of the brain we rely upon to express these skills in the majority of the populations adopting them.

In fact, our ability to adapt quickly, might even be a weakness now for the first time in our evolutionary journey as the most adaptable species on the planet.

If we adapt too fast and adopt new technologies that "think for us," we will lose vital skills and abilities that will soon be among the rarest and most valued.

But we’re not giving up that easy, are we, Reader? Join me and Tyler in our exciting new project: Reclaim 12 Vital Human Skills in 6 months!​ We are reading Graham Lee’s book Human Being - Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology, and we want you to read it with us! Our schedule is one chapter every 2 weeks, so it’s slow and easy to practice the skills, and discuss what we learn, while gathering resources and side quests, over the next 6 months. To finish by the end of 2026, we are starting the first chapter this week in July! It’s an extra long month, so you’re not behind - it’s really easy to read. You’ll catch up quick. And the first chapter is about Navigation! I learned more about wayfinding, memory and what we’re losing when we depend too much on technology than I ever expected! So click here to get a list of links to buy this book NOW and receive bi-weekly email reminders with our thoughts, maybe some audio recordings, and all the resources we collect to support you.

We may not be required to sail across thousands of miles of uncharted ocean on a raft without any instruments (except the mind) anytime soon, but we are looking at unknown territory ahead in this new world of extremely rapid technological advances.

Finding our own way through this technocratic nightmare, driven by billionaires who can escape to remote islands or mars, if all else fails, is going to be essential.

And even if the worst-case-scenario doesn’t happen, we still need these vital skills to thrive in the coming reality where most people have resigned their mind, body and will to the technology that offers them the easiest way forward, for now.

For me, an EarthCare practice has naturally provided a way to engage all my senses and skills as a human being, to keep them alive and well.

For you, Reader, it might be something else, but I believe a relationship with Nature really deepens our abilities to wayfind, because we are part of Nature too.

Either way I support you in this vital effort to lean into being a member of our beautiful species.

We are not a plague on this planet, we are the stewards, and we are standing up to protect our precious places from data centers and extractive technologies.

While doing so, we must reclaim and retain our own vital human skills, I daresay, at all costs.

Being human,

Kendra

PS. If you are local, or eager to visit and connect in person, you’re invited to The Living Room, an in-person experience on July 13th, hosted by friends in Dover, where we will practice some of these vital human skills, facilitated by traveling folks who are keeping them alive. Reply for more details to attend with me!

PPS. If you’ve been in business for 1-2 years or more, please join me on July 22 in Wayfinder with Tarzan Kay - a live, 2-hour facilitated workshop to help you find your own answers through self-leadership and the wisdom of the collective.

I can’t speak highly enough about the quality of support I’ve found for my business in this space, in her hands. I consider her a consent-based business elder, haha. And this is the workshop that changed my course last year - it helped me realize that I can trust myself to find the way.

Written by a human - Kendra Marie Hoffman

Diver deeper in my Substack ​Visit The Sensitive Edge: a writing project where we explore the ecotones between soil, systems, and soul - uncovering the wisdom found in our wounds and wildness.

If you read this far, I'm excited to whisper this to you...

I started writing about things like this (finding our own way, body-based wisdom and tech-concerns) a long time ago... finally started this substack in Spring 2025... and haven't updated it much since... honestly because I thought people didn't want to focus or read for that long... but now I'm realizing we need to practice that.. soo...

Do you like my longer writing? Would you like more of that?

Hit reply to let me know please <3