Which civilization gives you the best odds of actually being happy?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ancient Greece during the age of Pericles? Maybe \u2014 if you came back as a wealthy male citizen. But there were tens of thousands of slaves who built the Parthenon, and women had no legal rights. Roll the dice wrong, and your golden age is somebody else’s nightmare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n America in the 1950s? Sure \u2014 if you happened to be white, male, and straight. Otherwise, you’re drinking from a separate fountain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The advanced Muslim Abbasid Empire in 12th-century Spain? A genuine golden age of science, art, and tolerance. But still, constant wars and battles with Christian Spain.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n I started asking this question to historians, to thinkers, even to multiple AI systems. And the answers were fascinating. Modern Scandinavia kept coming up. The Abbasid Caliphate. Periclean Athens. But then there was one unlikely candidate that surfaced again and again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San people. Anytime before the 21st century. In three different AI models (Claude, OpenAI, Kimi), the San Culture came in the Top Ten.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of all the cultures that have ever existed on this planet \u2014 cultures that built pyramids and parliaments and empires \u2014 the one where you could come back as anyone<\/em> and almost surely live a dignified, equal, and connected life\u2026 was a group of hunter-gatherers roaming the savannahs of southern Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That stopped me cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because here\u2019s the fascinating thing. This culture is the longest unbroken culture we have, dating back tens of thousands of years. And mostly unchanged.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m writing this from a hotel room in Botswana. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been traveling across Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe \u2014 watching wildlife that feels almost mythological, standing in landscapes that look untouched by time, and learning about a continent that many of us in the West have come to severely misunderstand. Or worse \u2014 to underestimate entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last week, I wrote to you about what female elephants taught me about leadership. About how the matriarch leads not through force but through memory. About how nature, across species, keeps arriving at the same answer: wisdom over dominance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This week goes deeper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This week gets uncomfortable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because the San don’t just challenge how we lead. They challenge how we live. They challenge what we call progress. And they hold up a mirror to the modern world that, honestly, I wasn’t prepared for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you haven’t heard of the San, you might know the term “Bushmen.” That’s what the West has called them for centuries. But that word carries the stench of colonialism \u2014 it comes from the Dutch bossiesman<\/em>, meaning “bandit” or “outlaw,” a name given to them by the very people trying to destroy them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San have their own identity. And it goes back further than almost anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We’re not talking about a few hundred years. We’re not even talking about a few thousand. Genetic evidence suggests the San lineage diverged from other modern humans somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Their culture has been continuous for at least 20,000 years. Some scholars argue it’s the oldest living culture on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let me put that in perspective. The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids about 4,500 years ago. Ancient Greece peaked around 2,500 years ago. The Roman Empire rose and fell. The Renaissance came and went. The industrial revolution, the digital revolution \u2014 all of it \u2014 and the San were already ancient when those civilizations were young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We built progress. And lost happiness.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n They never had what we call progress. And may never have lost what we’re desperately trying to find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Damaraland, Namibia, I stood in front of rock paintings left by San ancestors over 6,000 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I expected something crude. Stick figures. Basic hunt scenes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s not what I found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These were sophisticated. They depicted animals and watering holes, yes \u2014 but they also depicted something far more startling: altered states of consciousness. Shamans in trance. Humans transforming into animals. Maps of inner worlds that were as real to the San as the physical landscape around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See the Lion at the bottom with the extended tail. That\u2019s not representing a physical lion. It represents the Shaman entering the consciousness of the Lion to gain insights on the world around him. This was breathwork and trance states 6,000 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San didn’t just survive in the desert. They built a civilization of the mind. While we were still millennia away from writing our first philosophical texts, they were already exploring the architecture of consciousness \u2014 and painting what they found on rock walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few days later, I visited a small San school in Namibia. I sat down to greet the children, expecting maybe a few shy smiles. Some polite curiosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, the children rushed toward me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They surrounded me \u2014 laughing, reaching out, completely unafraid. And then they started touching my beard. Gently. Carefully. Almost reverently, like they were discovering a new texture that didn’t exist in their world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Image shared with respect and permission from the Ombili Foundation that runs this school in Namibia<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. About a dozen kids, all stroking my chin, giggling, fascinated. And in that moment, it clicked:<\/p>\n\n\n\n They had never seen a beard before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now here’s where things get genuinely fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s a hypothesis in evolutionary biology \u2014 still debated, but compelling \u2014 that beards may have evolved partly as protection. Studies have shown that facial hair can absorb and distribute the force of a blow to the jaw, reducing the chance of a fracture by as much as 30%. In environments where male-to-male violence was common, this would have been a significant survival advantage. Over thousands of generations, men in violent cultures would have been selected for thicker facial hair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So think about what it means when an entire culture barely has beards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San are known to be one of the least violent societies in human history. No wars. No armies. No glorification of dominance. Anthropologists who have studied them describe them as “fiercely egalitarian” \u2014 not passively peaceful, but actively<\/em> committed to preventing any individual from rising above the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And possibly \u2014 even at a biological level \u2014 they carry the evidence of tens of thousands of years without the kind of violence that shaped the rest of the human family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some evolutionary biologists suggest that their faces may be telling a story their culture has been living all along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’ve read my book, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind<\/em>, you know I think about human behavior in terms of operating systems. Every civilization runs on one \u2014 a set of models of reality and systems for living that determine how people think, act, and organize themselves. I call the outdated, unquestioned rules in these systems Brules \u2014 bullsh*t rules. And most of the Brules we carry about what makes a “successful” society come from civilizations that lasted a few hundred years at best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San operating system has been running for tens of thousands of years. And it breaks almost every rule the modern world takes for granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No hierarchy.<\/strong> The San have no chiefs, no permanent leaders, no one who accumulates power over others. Leadership is fluid and contextual \u2014 whoever has the knowledge the moment requires takes the lead. A skilled hunter leads during the hunt. A healer leads during the ceremony. Then they step back into the group. No pedestals. No thrones. No corner offices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Men and women are genuinely equal.<\/strong> Not in the performative way modern societies talk about equality \u2014 where we write policies and still pay women less. In the San world, men and women hold distinct roles that are equally vital and equally respected. The men hunt. But the women are the navigators. They know where the water sources are hidden beneath dry riverbeds. They track the movement of game across vast stretches of savannah. They know which plants heal, which nourish, which kill. When the tribe moves \u2014 and they move constantly, following the game \u2014 it’s the women’s knowledge that keeps everyone alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you read last week’s newsletter on female elephants, you’ll recognize the pattern. In elephant herds, the matriarch leads because she remembers where the water is. Among the San, the women carry the same knowledge. Nature keeps arriving at the same answer, across species, across millennia: memory and wisdom over force and dominance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything is shared.<\/strong> When a hunter makes a kill, the tribe moves its portable shelters to the site. They feast together. Then they move again. They’ve been doing this for 10,000 years. There is no accumulation. No identity tied to what you own. No hoarding. This isn’t poverty \u2014 it’s a design choice. The San solved an equation that modern economists are still struggling with: beyond a certain point, more stuff doesn’t make you happier. They figured this out before the wheel was invented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now here’s the part that really broke something in me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San have a practice that anthropologist Richard Lee documented called “insulting the meat.” It is, without exaggeration, one of the most brilliant social technologies I’ve ever encountered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s how it works. A hunter goes out. He tracks an animal \u2014 sometimes for days. He makes the kill. He comes back to camp. And instead of being celebrated, instead of anyone saying you’re incredible<\/em> \u2014 everyone, including the hunter himself, downplays the kill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “That? That skinny old thing? Barely worth eating.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Look at that pathetic animal. You call that a hunt?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the hunter joins in. He laughs about his mistakes. Jokes about how the giraffe nearly trampled him because he tripped over his own feet. He makes himself small \u2014 on purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn’t cruelty. It’s not false modesty. It’s a social technology<\/em> designed to prevent the most destructive force any community can face: unchecked ego.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An elder from the group explained it like this: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way, we cool his heart and make him gentle.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n We cool his heart and make him gentle.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Forty thousand years of social cohesion. Built on a single insight: ego is the enemy of community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now hold that in your mind. And think about the kind of leaders we celebrate today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are living in an era that glorifies the opposite of everything the San built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We amplify ego. We reward dominance. We build pedestals for individuals who speak about power as though volume equals vision. We have world leaders who threaten to wipe out entire civilizations and face no consequence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the San culture, this doesn’t stand. It can’t<\/em> stand. Their entire social operating system is designed to prevent exactly this \u2014 the elevation of any single ego above the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last week, I wrote about female elephants and how nature chose wisdom over dominance. This week, the San are showing me the same pattern, but in human terms: civilizations that glorify ego eventually collapse under the weight of it. Civilizations that regulate the ego endure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable question: What if we have this fundamentally wrong? What if the future of humanity isn’t in glorifying certain individuals, but in equality? What if the world needs less of the strongman archetype and more of the leadership model that nature \u2014 and the San \u2014 arrived at independently?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Less ego. More community. More women in positions of power. More leaders who foster connection rather than division.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San figured this out before the Bronze Age. And we still haven’t caught up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One evening in Namibia, a San guide walked me through their shamanic healing rituals. And it felt like stepping into another dimension of human experience. I didn\u2019t witness the healing, but my guide explained it to me via a mural on the wall of a San School in Namibia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San have healers \u2014 both men and women \u2014 who enter altered states of consciousness through what’s known as the trance dance. Women sit in a circle around a fire, clapping and singing medicine songs that they’ve known since childhood. The healers dance around the periphery, sometimes for hours, until a spiritual energy the San call n\/om<\/em> rises through their bodies. It starts in the belly, rises through the spine, and then the healer crosses over into what they describe as another reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My guide described a ritual where\u2026as the “patient” goes into a trance, the healer heats a knife in the fire until it’s red hot. He then plunges the knife into the patient and pulls it out. When the knife is pulled out, there is no scar, there is no wounding. The patient also experiences no pain. The illness is then healed.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n You will see this in the mural above. One shaman gently caresses the woman while the shaman behind her is about to plunge a knife into her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this state, healers touch the sick and draw illness from their bodies. They mend disputes. They restore the social fabric of the group. The San describe it as “arrows of sickness” being pulled from the community and flung into the darkness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My guide explained to me that his grandfather, a San shaman, still performs this healing ritual today.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time San adults reach maturity, roughly half the men and a third of the women have become healers. This isn’t a priesthood reserved for the elite. It’s distributed. Communal. Available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rock paintings I saw \u2014 6,000 years old \u2014 depicted exactly this. Shamans in trance. The boundary between human and animal is dissolving. Consciousness expanding beyond the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We in the West tend to dismiss this as superstition. But I’ve spent two decades studying consciousness, meditation, and human performance. I’ve built Mindvalley on the premise that transcendent practices \u2014 the Silva Method, meditation, altered states \u2014 are not fringe experiences but essential human technologies. And what the San developed isn’t primitive. It’s the original<\/em> technology of consciousness. It’s been running, unbroken, for longer than any other system on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We think we invented mindfulness. The San have been practicing it for 20,000 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This brings me to something personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When The Code of the Extraordinary Mind<\/em> hit number one globally in 2017, I had a choice. I could lean into being “the guru.” Build the personal brand. Become the center of the platform. Every incentive in the modern world pointed that direction \u2014 because our systems reward exactly that kind of ego amplification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I chose to break the model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of positioning myself as the singular voice, I opened Mindvalley to hundreds of teachers. Different perspectives. Different modalities. Even ideas that conflict with my own. Because I believe that truth doesn’t belong to one person. It emerges from many.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Compare this to the guru model that dominates the personal development world \u2014 where a single personality becomes the brand, the doctrine, the untouchable center. Some of those gurus built grandiose names for themselves and then turned up in the Epstein files. That’s what happens when ego goes unchecked. The San would have seen it coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That decision to distribute authority rather than concentrate it changed everything \u2014 not just for the company, but for me. Because the moment you remove ego from the center of leadership, you create space for something the San have always known is more powerful: community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s a word that echoes across southern Africa. In Botswana, they call it botho<\/em>. In South Africa and much of the Bantu-speaking world, it’s ubuntu<\/em>. The translation sounds simple, but it contains an entire philosophy of what it means to be human:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am because we are.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Not “I think, therefore I am” \u2014 the Cartesian formula that built the entire Western model of selfhood on the isolated individual mind. But something fundamentally different: I exist because of my connection to you. My humanity is not mine alone. It is something we create together.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it like this: “Ubuntu is not ‘I think therefore I am.’ It says rather: ‘I am a human because I belong. I participate. I share.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San embody this more deeply than perhaps any culture in history. When a healer enters trance to draw out sickness, they’re not treating an individual \u2014 they’re healing the community. When the tribe insults the meat, they’re not putting down the hunter \u2014 they’re protecting the collective from the cancer of ego. When men and women share leadership based on who holds the right knowledge for the moment, they’re not being “progressive.” They’re running an operating system that’s been tested and optimized across more generations than any civilization on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now layer something else onto all of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the next decade, we are heading toward a world where work becomes optional for many. Where universal basic income shifts from theory to inevitability. Where ownership starts to lose its meaning because access becomes abundant, and the cost of goods approaches zero. Where the game we’ve built our identities around \u2014 accumulation, status, dominance \u2014 begins to dissolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other words, whether we realize it or not, the future is starting to look less like modern capitalism and more like a campfire in the Kalahari.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shared resources. Fluid roles. Community over status. Identity rooted not in what you own, but in who you are to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are drifting \u2014 some of us kicking and screaming \u2014 back toward something ancient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the most important thing I can tell you for the next ten years is this: be careful who you follow. Avoid egocentric leaders. Vote for people who foster community rather than division. The world doesn’t need more strongmen on pedestals. It needs more leaders who understand, at a bone-deep level, that their power belongs to the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The San knew this before they had a written language. We’re going to have to re-learn it with all of ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I sit here in Botswana, about to fly home. And one question keeps looping through my mind, and I can’t make it stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if the most advanced civilization in human history wasn’t the one that built the tallest buildings, the fastest computers, or the most destructive weapons?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if it was the one that figured out how to keep every single member of the group \u2014 regardless of gender, regardless of role \u2014 fed, healthy, equal, and connected? For longer than any other culture on the planet?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we didn’t evolve forward, but sideways \u2014 gaining technology while losing something essential about how to be human together?<\/p>\n\n\n\n We optimized life. And forgot how to live.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But the blueprint for something better has been here all along. In a place where children have never seen a beard, because they’ve never needed protection from each other. Where a hunter comes home with a kill and the first thing his people do is laugh at him, because they know that the moment his ego grows, the community dies. Where healers dance themselves into another dimension to keep their people whole. Where the oldest woman in the group holds more authority than any king, because she remembers where the water is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am because we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe it’s time we remembered that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If this sparked anything in you, take a moment to leave a comment below\u2014I read them all.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Vishen<\/p>\n\n\n\n PS: Everything I wrote about in this newsletter \u2013 community over ego, shared learning over guru worship, the idea that human beings thrive when they grow together rather than alone \u2014 that’s exactly what Mindvalley U<\/a> <\/strong>was built to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every year, we bring together people from over 100 countries to live, learn, and grow side by side for two full weeks. Not in a lecture hall. Not behind a screen. In person. Families, entrepreneurs, artists, seekers, all eating together, learning together, raising their kids together in a pop-up community that, honestly, feels closer to how humans were designed to live than anything the modern world typically offers.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWriting this from Namibia & Botswana<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The oldest culture you’ve never heard of<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
6,000-year-old maps of the mind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Damaraland](\"https:\/\/storage.googleapis.com\/mv-prod-blog-en-assets\/2026\/04\/069200f6-damaraland-rock-painting.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe moment I didn’t expect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Vishen](\"https:\/\/storage.googleapis.com\/mv-prod-blog-en-assets\/2026\/04\/efb26bf1-vishen-with-san-tribe-children.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhat a beard might reveal about violence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
An operating system that actually works<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Insulting the meat<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The ego problem we refuse to see<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The fire, the dance, and the oldest technology of consciousness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"San](\"https:\/\/storage.googleapis.com\/mv-prod-blog-en-assets\/2026\/04\/7699ec27-san-people-healing-painting.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhat I learned building Mindvalley<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I am because we are<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The future is moving toward them<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The question that won’t leave me<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Vishen](\"https:\/\/storage.googleapis.com\/mv-prod-blog-en-assets\/2024\/12\/99dc1d9d-vishen_signature.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n