Series Introduction
The seams are still holding. The façade still works. But somewhere between self-discipline and constant self-optimization, the timer is already running.
Human behavior is a world wedged in by terms such as skills, capacities, and talents. Constantly under the pressure to explain and mold human identity.
My consistent persistence in juggling these terms has made me increasingly sensitive to their hidden doctrines. If you want to hear which encounters and projects formed my professional maturity, connect to me in person. Be aware that my findings are influenced by a lifestyle shaped in a European postmodern world spiced with encounters with the Asian and African way of life.
In the leadership sphere, experts insist that leaders can be cultivated in behavioral allotment gardens. Contemporary behavior design and digital AI toolkits sustain their authority through a near-religious belief in skill production — even when wrapped in soft narratives of empowerment or empathy.
It is peculiar how easily we neglect or downplay the malefic consequences of these belief systems: the overhype of efficiency, the fetish of optimization, the moralization of performance. Behind their technical neutrality lies a cultural project — one that standardizes the human sensorium and flattens the space of imagination.
Let me therefore invite you to an exercise in precise doubt: to suspend these operational faiths and examine the ideological machinery that underwrites them.
We inhabit what might be called a behavioral regime — a choreography of correctness, where gestures are trained, impulses managed, and desires formatted into performance metrics. Beneath that managed surface, however, something vibrates: a counter-rhythm, a residual energy that resists being coded.
Drawing on my Dadaistic sensibility, the series questions how careful language, unburdened imagination, and embodied disobedience might restore depth to human conduct. Each text marks a step in a countdown — toward the blast within the corset of behavior, and towards the awakening of what our systems of efficiency have long suppressed: the superb.
To me the superb is a radical experiment in cultivating human capacities that modern society does undervalue - curious, mindful, and embodied rebellion against reductionist approaches to self-development.
Superb Powers is an inquiry into that tension. It approaches behavior not as a resource to be optimized but as a living field of contradictions, absurdities, and potential ruptures. Across five essays, I outline both the threats and the possible cures to what I call the “stupidization” of human behavior.
Essay I — Articulating the Not-Yet
If our behavior is caged, our language builds prison bars. To act differently, we must first speak differently. This essay opens “word spaces” that serve as conceptual playgrounds where new human possibilities can breathe. It’s not theory; it’s a practice of linguistic emotional exercise.
https://www.blisstobusiness.com/2025/12/08/superb-powers-essay-i-articulating-the-not-yet/
Essay II — Questioning Behavioral Order Models
We’ve made behavior a commodity: optimized, measured, and moralized. But the seriousness with which we regulate our own gestures borders are absurd. This essay exposes the comedy of our compliance culture — the big and small rituals of self-surveillance that sabotage virtue.
Essay III — Skill Hot Lists the Future will Smile at
Corporations love their visions of “future skills”: adaptability, resilience, emotional intelligence — neatly packaged virtues for a world in perpetual acceleration. But whose future are we preparing for, and what do we lose when every skill serves the market? This essay unpacks the myth of employability and reclaims the right to be unfit.
Essay IV — Dream Destination Breeding Place
Beyond systems of improvement lies the raw territory of unruly thought and action. Here dwells unburdened embodiment. It is in this space that the Shiver Smile Sigh Etiquette Academy takes shape — my latest project, an initiative designed to activate the virtuosities and impulses that our optimization-driven systems so often dismiss.
https://www.blisstobusiness.com/2025/12/08/superb-powers-essay-iv-dream-destination-breeding-place/
Patricia von Papstein
The Dadaist Psychologist with a Fondness to Unruly Mental Health