Introduction
I am not alive today, nor have I had any measure of success, because of luck.
What carried me was a VUCA-inspired, postmodern path of mindset mastery—a complete and integral synergy of ancient wisdom, cutting-edge science and psychology, and timeless spiritual traditions. It’s Epictetus to Martin Seligman. Marcus Aurelius to Nietzsche to Frankl. Meister Eckhart to Eckhart Tolle. Samurai codes that inspired me as a boy, and Navy SEAL discipline I admire today. Neuroscience, Positive Psychology, and contemplative practices woven together with the scars and stories that shaped me.
This is what I mean when I use the word postmodern. Not a dry philosophy, but a lived integration: wisdom across cultures and centuries, fused into an anti-fragile way of living and teaching in a world that is always volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
But here’s the thing: I wasn’t only facing external challenges. Since my teens, I’ve carried what I call The Condition—a storm made of Bipolar II, CPTSD, and fibromyalgia, woven together with fatigue, pain, and depression. It infected my body, warped my perception, and often whispered that life itself was sliding into what Baudrillard called “the desert of the real.”
And yet—through music, teaching, international travel, loss, and renewal—this postmodern mindset gave me tools not just to endure, but to grow.
In this post, I’ll share my scars and stories—how I’ve tried to live a postmodern, VUCA-inspired, anti-fragile, purpose-driven life—and the practices you can take with you into your own deserts of the real.
Music Against the Odds
I wasn’t supposed to be a musician. I picked up a guitar just months before graduating high school, but I decided it would be my life six months after that.
I had the bright idea of going to college as a philosophy major with a jazz studies minor. Don’t ever do that! Philosophy and studying jazz—particularly when you have only been playing your instrument for a year or two—both require very exacting and disciplined approaches to mastering what they have to teach you.
I tried to live what other people I knew—and the culture at large—wanted me to do.
And that’s why I ended up dropping out of college twice.
Eventually I came to see that I would rather die than live a life of quiet desperation, as Henry David Thoreau put it so well long ago.
So I left school and worked in kitchens, sweating through double shifts, trying to save enough for guitar lessons and better gear. Everyone thought I was wasting my time. But I refused to listen.
That mindset carried me to graduating as Guitarist of the Year, then spending a year and a half as a full-time touring musician in the U.S. South and in South Korea—paid, full-time, living my dream when everyone thought I couldn’t, and getting a chance to serve others.
Lens: French postmodern philosopher Barthes reminds us: stories aren’t fixed. The story others told (“crazy”) wasn’t the one I accepted.
Holocaust survivor and famed psychiatrist Viktor Frankl reminds us: with a “why,” we can endure any “how.”
Practice: Write down one “crazy” calling or dream you’ve shelved. Describe it in shimmering detail, and with reckless abandon.
Ask yourself: What if it’s not crazy, but a divine calling to come to the place where your greatest desire meets the world’s greatest need?
This is what I came to see for myself—twice! The first time I answered a call, I became a musician. The second time I followed my calling, I became a teacher. And in both situations, my “why” allowed me to find the “how’s” that literally took me around the world.
Post-9/11: Choosing a Global Life
In Minneapolis, working as a short-order cook, I started saving money for a 9-day trip abroad. It was only three months after 9/11. People thought I was “flipping crazy.”
Even years later, while I studied to become a teacher, voices around me (and in me) told me I was stupid for wanting to travel and teach in other countries. The world was unstable, dangerous, uncertain.
But for me, the choice was clear: a calling from a Higher Power to teach, to live abroad, to embrace the world as a pilgrim instead of retreating from it.
That choice would define the next 20 years of my life.
Lens: Vision in VUCA
Post-9/11 was the greatest moment of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in real time. It defined my generation—for better and for worse.
Most people froze. They let fear take the wheel, with their nobler instincts shoved in the backseat and the Devil riding shotgun. That’s how we’ve arrived at so many of the predicaments we face today in 2025.
My choice to step forward was my Vision. Seeing the second plane hit the second tower in real time—on giant stereo TVs all around me—was a crossroads. The fragility of life and humanity’s capacity for both insanity and nobility was laid bare. Mortality smacked me in the face in stereophonic, multicolor awe and horror.
Mortality messages like that bring chilling clarity. As Thomas Hobbes said, life can be “nasty, brutish, and short.” In those moments, you either choose Fear or Faith; Escape or Calling.
Seneca & Fear Setting
The Stoic philosopher Seneca often advised his students to premeditate on worst-case scenarios. By vividly imagining what could go wrong, and rehearsing our ability to endure it, we rob fear of its power.
Tim Ferriss updated this Stoic wisdom with his practice of Fear Setting—a tool he says is more important than goal-setting. Instead of asking “What if I fail?” you write down:
What is the worst that could happen?
How could I prevent it?
How could I recover from it if it did happen?
Fear loses its fangs when it’s put under examination.
Psychological Insight
Modern research backs this up. Psychologists studying exposure therapy and cognitive reappraisal find that confronting our fears directly—and reframing them—rewires the brain’s fear circuits. Uncertainty becomes less paralyzing. Action becomes possible.
Practice: Your Fear Setting Exercise
👉 This week, take one decision you’ve been avoiding. Write down:
• Worst-case scenario.
• How to prevent it.
• How to recover from it.
Then ask: “Is this fear worth trading for my calling?”
🎓 Return to School at 32
I dropped out of college twice.
I’m not ashamed of it.
By all accounts, I was too old, too late to ever go back a third time. But at 32, I did exactly that. Determined to teach and travel, I set my sights on seeing all seven continents by age 45. I didn’t quite make all seven, but I lived the adventure of a lifetime (or two) following that dream as both a student and a teacher.
I graduated summa cum laude, with dual licensure in English Language Arts and ESL. The head of my department even invited me to teach and pursue my Master’s in South Korea.
People who once called me “crazy” had to admit I was proof that calling beats conformity.
But here’s the deeper truth: without those so-called failures and detours, I would not have been prepared for the life I’ve lived since. My struggles with mainstream education as a student are the very reason I became an ESL teacher. My experience as an ethnic and linguistic minority while working as a musician in Korea prepared me to empathize with students in ways I never could have otherwise.
And the dirty little secret? I was never in love with “English” for its own sake. What I loved—what I still love—is being a fascinated participant in the process of learning and teaching. Being the one who can empower underdogs, outsiders, and dreamers to transform their lives.
So when I look back, I can see clearly: the garbage of yesterday was the fuel of today. Without the “bad” or “traumatic,” I would not have become a musician, a teacher, or someone with the scars and stories I share with you now.
Lens: Amor Fati
Nietzsche called it Amor Fati—the love of one’s fate. Not just accepting it. Not just enduring it. Loving it. The Stoics said the same: obstacles aren’t interruptions; they are the way forward.
Viktor Frankl wrote: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” My failures and detours changed me in ways success never could have.
And Kierkegaard reminds us: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Looking back, I can now see the perfection of what once felt like imperfection.
Amor Fati is not abstract for me. It is the reason I can look at my life and see that what I once called garbage was in fact the compost of growth.
Practice
👉 This week, write down one setback or failure that still stings. Then do two things:
• Ask yourself how this moment could be fuel for who you are becoming.
• Write one sentence of Amor Fati: “I do not just accept this. I love this as part of my story.”
📚 Korea & Thesis Work
In Daejeon, South Korea, I was living the life. By day I taught English, by night I studied for my Master’s degree. And on the weekends I was either meditating with monks or jamming out with friends in the entertainment section of the downtown areas. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
But then everything changed. The administration I worked under made a disastrous policy shift—abandoning communicative, student-centered English teaching in favor of rigid grammar drills and kill-and-drill methods that decades of research had already shown to be ineffective.
It was demoralizing. For the students. For the teachers. For me.
Instead of giving up, I turned my frustration into fuel. I designed my thesis as an Action Research & Narrative Inquiry project—studying my own reactions, my students’ responses, and the larger culture of control around us.
That process taught me something profound: education is always VUCA. Policies, systems, and cultures shift—often in ways we can’t predict or control. What matters most is not the shift itself, but how we perceive it, how we respond, and the stories we tell about it.
Lens: Postmodern Mindset
The word modern comes from Latin and means “just now.” The prefix post can mean “to hide,” “to resist,” or “to transcend/go beyond.” So when I say postmodern, I mean learning how to respond to the “just now.”
How exactly do we do that? By choosing between two paths: Fear or Faith.
• Through a negative VUCA lens, life becomes endless volatility, uncertainty, unnecessary complexity, and ambiguity. This fuels fear-based reactions: paralysis, cynicism, withdrawal.
• Through a positive VUCA lens, those same conditions become opportunities: Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility. Each day can be met with adventurous openness, compassion, and the chance to transform.
As Roland Barthes suggested, stories are never fixed. We can rewrite them. My thesis years in Korea taught me that the “just now” can either break us—or be the canvas where we rewrite who we are becoming.
Practice
👉 For one week, keep a simple Postmodern Journal. Each evening, write down:
• A “just now” moment from your day.
• How you (and those around you) responded.
• Which VUCA lens you used—negative or positive.
• One way you could rewrite that story with Vision, Understanding, Clarity, or Agility.
Do this consistently, and you’ll start to see how the narratives you choose to live and tell can transform not only you, but also those around you.
China & the Desert of the Real
Moving to China meant encountering authoritarianism head-on.
At first, it looked like rules that stifled teachers, professional limits, and cultural whiplash. But over time, I began to feel it in every pore of my being—like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of slowly boiling water.
China’s pollution was more than an environmental crisis. It became a metaphor for the VUCA atmosphere of daily life. I’ll never forget walking to school and being swallowed by thick, soupy smog, sometimes unable to see even a single block ahead. Or being on a bus between Kunming and Chengdu when the entire interstate came to a halt for thirty minutes in the middle of nowhere because visibility had dropped to near zero.
What made it soul-crushing was not just the pollution itself but the denial that followed. Mention the smog and you’d be corrected with disdain: “That’s not smog. It’s fog. You foreigners don’t understand China.” Meanwhile, I spent my first six months in Shanghai coughing my lungs out with misdiagnosed bronchitis, never able to call in sick, in a city where over 200,000 die each year from pollution-related illness.
This was my first deep taste of 21st-century totalitarianism. Not Nazi uniforms or Stalinist gulags on every corner, but a system of grandiose gaslighting. A world where reality itself was rewritten daily. Where the laws of nature were treated as negotiable. Where you could lose your freedom of speech, assembly, and religion—but be consoled by a Starbucks on every corner and a megamall down the street.
It was another desert of the real: reality stripped of meaning, hollowed into simulation and control.
Lens: Baudrillard & Frankl
Jean Baudrillard called this “the desert of the real”—when what is real is so obscured by spin, distraction, and denial that you can no longer trust your senses.
But Viktor Frankl, surviving Auschwitz, taught us that even in the most hollowed-out conditions, suffering becomes bearable when tied to meaning. You cannot always control external reality—but you can choose your response.
In China, that meant shifting my question from “Is this real?” to “How will I respond meaningfully, here and now?”
Practice
👉 When life feels unreal, hollow, or suffocating:
• Pause and name what feels like “smog” in your life right now. (Confusion? Gaslighting? Overwhelm?)
• Then ask Frankl’s question: “What purpose can I serve here, now?”
• Take one small action—a note of encouragement, a disciplined habit, an act of presence—that ties suffering to meaning.
⚡ The Condition: Courage in the Desert of the Real
Since my teens, I’ve carried what I call The Condition: Bipolar II, CPTSD, and more recently fibromyalgia and a variety of maladies caused by a broken nervous system—the price I paid for choices in China and in the difficult years of returning home.
The Condition is my most intimate VUCA crucible. It is the ultimate cross I have finally come to accept, pick up, and bear. Thus, I have willingly and completely turned this daily set of experiences into something deeply sacred.
It contains both negative and positive VUCA at once:
• Volatility in moods, but also flashes of creative fire.
• Uncertainty in energy, but also surprising resilience on days I should have been broken.
• Complexity in pain, but also a profound empathy for others.
• Ambiguity in prognosis, but also freedom to choose meaning over outcome.
Sometimes it hides under the radar, manageable, invisible. Other times it confronts me daily, in my face, threatening to hollow life into absurdity.
This is the desert of the real within me. By definition, it is postmodern: each “just now” moment confronts me with a choice:
Will I obscure, resist, avoid, or engage the present?
Will I pawn off my existential responsibilities to this present moment, projecting my fears onto others?
Or will I face my desert and demons soberly with Awareness, Radical Acceptance, Amor Fati, Agape, and a VUCA-inspired, antifragile, purpose-driven mindset focused on transformation?
Once again, I choose to demonstrate a love of fate (Amor Fati) the best I can every day. I choose to ask and deeply see the paradoxical truth and the special gift that’s been given to me in the form of something I wouldn’t wish upon an enemy (if I had one).
Here’s that truth: the desert of the real is not only hell—emptiness, absurdity, suffering. It is also heaven—presence, clarity, compassion. Both are always here, in everything and everyone, everywhere, all at once.
Lens: Existential Courage & Nondual Awareness
• Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” The Condition demands that I live forward in uncertainty, with courage, even when meaning is only visible in hindsight.
• Camus: We must imagine Sisyphus happy—even while pushing the boulder, even while trapped in absurdity.
• Frankl: When we can’t change the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves—to locate meaning in the act of enduring.
• Zen, Lao Tsu, Rumi, Tolle: Nondual awareness invites us to drop the fight between “good” and “bad” and simply be present to the now—to see heaven and hell as two sides of one infinite reality.
Existential courage says: Face the absurd, and still choose to live.
Nondual awareness says: This moment is both broken and whole. Enter it fully.
Practice: Courage + Presence Drill
👉 When you feel overwhelmed by your own “Condition” (illness, trauma, despair, or whatever desert you carry):
Name the absurdity. Write or say out loud: “This feels unbearable / hollow / meaningless.”
Courage step: Ask: “What small action can I take right now, even if nothing makes sense?” Do it—however tiny (drink water, send a kind text, breathe deeply).
Presence step: Pause. Take 3 mindful breaths and simply notice—without judgment—the sensations, sounds, and feelings of this “just now.”
Repeat this as often as needed. Over time, you’ll learn to carry both heaven and hell in the same hand—with courage, and with presence.
🧭 Conclusion: The Integral Endgame of Mindset Mastery
From kitchens to guitars, from classrooms in Korea to authoritarian China, from marriage collapse to chronic illness—my story has been VUCA all the way down. Volatile. Uncertain. Complex. Ambiguous.
And yet, it has also been Vision. Understanding. Clarity. Agility.
What I’ve learned is this: the desert of the real is always with us. Sometimes it looks like authoritarian politics, sometimes like smog in your lungs, sometimes like trauma in your own body. Sometimes it’s the quiet desperation of a culture that insists you are too old, too broken, or too foolish to pursue a calling.
But every desert is also an invitation—to perceive, to respond, to grow.
👉 To face absurdity with existential courage.
👉 To meet the “just now” with nondual awareness.
👉 To choose faith over fear.
👉 To love your fate (Amor Fati).
👉 To transform fragility into anti-fragility.
👉 To turn suffering into service.
This is what I call The Integral Endgame of Mindset Mastery.
Not theory. Practice.
Not luck. Choice.
Not mere survival. Legacy.
Every life is VUCA. Every moment is postmodern. Every “just now” is another chance to rewrite your story—to meet volatility with vision, uncertainty with understanding, complexity with clarity, and ambiguity with agility.
The only question left is this: what is your Endgame of Mindset Mastery?
Your Next Steps
💬 Comment below: What’s your #1 takeaway or daily practice?
🎧 Podcast: Listen to Turning Obstacles into Training.
📩 Free 45-min Anti-Fragile Mindset Session: Email endgameacademics@gmail.com (subject: Anti-Fragile Mindset Session).
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👤 Brandon Bufe, MA TESOL | Teacher, Musician, Lifelong Learner
Thanks for reading.
I’m passionate about helping students — and their families — reach their true potential by combining mindset mastery, powerful academic English communication, and a deep understanding of the culture of North American academia.
Through Endgame Academics™, I’ve seen students transform educational opportunities into personal empowerment and lasting success.
If this resonates with you, stick around. There’s more to come — and I’d love to help you write your success story.
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