Meet Evan Gary Hirsch

 

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Evan Gary Hirsch a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Evan Gary, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I believe that resilience is one of humans’ greatest qualities, and has been the driving force to enable our survival for these few hundred thousands of years. We can only imagine the adversity, challenges, and opposition to survival that our ancestors (and some of us!) have faced along the journey to the present day. I feel that the primary driving force for humans is to love, be loved, belong to something bigger than ourselves, and participate in something that benefits more than just us. As one of Leo Buscaglia’s books is titled, we are literally “Born for Love”. As they say, no man is an island, and we literally could not survive on our own. If you think you can, just try to imagine building a shelter, making your own clothes (including footwear), hunting, gathering, or growing all your food, generating your own energy, finding a clean water source, and supplying yourself with all your needs, including what becomes medically necessary, and not using a single thing or component that was made by anyone else. We learn through this thought experiment very quickly how much we truly rely upon one another for our mere literal survival. It is why I believe we were biologically programmed through our hormones and other chemistry to love one another and adapt in whatever way we have to in order to get along and collaborate on sustaining our existence. We are literally programmed by the world around us, including the people, and through epigenetics, our DNA is altered by this external influence. Our resilience is therefore a necessary ingredient in this entire process of living. So where do I get my resilience from? From whatever source you feel you attribute to our creation. Because it is one of the most built in, fundamental aspects of who we are. Life can be quite challenging, especially in our extremely complicated technological age. Our culture is evolving faster than our minds have the ability to adapt, so it certainly gets frustrating. My resilience and tenacity comes from my drive to accomplish my goals and make the contribution I seek to make to my human family.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

My “career”, “creative”, and “occupational” endeavors are a bit tricky to define. I suppose you could say that for income I am an investor, however that actually takes up very little of my time, and these days I used managed funds anyway, so it’s even more hands-off than ever. Given that I have the luxury of choosing my general life activities, they are a bit varied. Given that I do have more financial resources than I need, I practice philanthropy. That has led me to search deeper and deeper for more broad reaching causes and organizations that show promise to help actually change the system that is perpetuating so much harm on us and our world. And I find them elusive. Capitalism/business/money are so pervasive, and our society is so structured around their limitations that not many people nor entities seem to be working on the big picture shift into another operating system for the world, which I feel it needs if we are to undo the damage done and alter our collective course to one with a recognition of our biological relatedness and interdependence.

Besides that, I am a musician, who goes by The Blue Rocker, with a rock duo and solo projects, as well as a content creator having produced a short film, a documentary, interviewed over 200 people, and made multiple series for our YouTube channels. Music is my main focus at present with the self-titled debut album having come out this year for my duo Soul Twin Messiah, and my debut solo single “Our Modern Times” just having come out in July of 2024. We have a rock musical based on 33 of our songs, for which the story has been written, but we need to develop the actual book (script), and then my neighbors have offered to premiere it in their theater. The messaging through all of these creative endeavors is fairly consistent. It’s about recognizing our current societal programming, and working to make the shifts in our individual perspectives and behaviors so we can work together to improve our world. All of this is accomplished through focusing on love being the driving force, rather than the multitude forms of fear that generally currently drive/limit us.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

What has been most impactful for me are my social skills, curiosity, and positive, confident attitude. These are all things I was generally inclined toward from birth, though I do believe they are possible to cultivate, as I have seen people blossom in many cases where it was clear their inclination was to retreat. The best thing we can do is to educate ourselves about emotional intelligence, brain hacking, self-reprogramming, and improving our motivation and effectiveness in setting and accomplishing goals. We can work on improving our emotional intelligence and regulating our behavior so that the pursuit of our goals are facilitated and can happen with greater ease and more effectiveness. Getting out of our shells, our domiciles, and our comfort zones, and talking to people, relating as best we can, and collaborating with them on worthy projects is the next step. Above all, to keep seeking deeper and deeper understandings, creating deeper meaning for ourselves and our lives, and accomplishing goals beyond what we previously thought (assumed) possible are some of the most noble and worthy tasks we can use our brains to pursue.

Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?

Since my current output is mainly music, I have to say fans of rock n roll in its many varieties, since my music is quite varied but all based on rock. Beyond that, anyone who feels they are seeking deeper understandings of who we are, what makes us tick, and how we can evolve our perspectives and actions toward ones that align with our values and help improve the world for everyone. As many intelligent people have posited, the world is not coming to an end any time soon, but us humans are certainly in danger in many ways. Multiple species are threatened and even already extinct from our human actions, and we are already suffering in many ways from our current systems and ways of doing things. I believe this course can be corrected, but it certainly doesn’t seem like it will be easy. We are often our own worst enemies, and that is a sad place to be. Our predicament cannot be overcome, however, until we recognize the actual causes and stop simply scapegoating this group or that, and realizing that we are all part of the problem and have the potential to be part of the solution. Until we hear way more people talking about how our minds are programmed to lead us all astray, I won’t be convinced we are actually making any progress though, because we are deeply stuck in a mindset in most cases, and changing a convinced mind is one of the most difficult things to do. So the people who would be ideal for me are those ready to work on themselves in a drastic way to overcome who they believe themselves to be, put their ego aside, and grow/evolve into the loving and compassionate person they have the capacity to be. And we get to do this through the joy of music, sharing, and collective actions of joy and a celebration of life itself and our great fortune to have one and share it with our vast human family.

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Image Credits

Pat Johnson, Michael Sanville, and Andrew Cameron Bailey

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