The first myth for us to tackle is the idea that there are very few people in Fundamental Wellbeing. That it even might be something that only happens to someone once in a thousand years, and so on. When we first started our research project, many people openly wondered if we could even find a handful of subjects.

Well, it wasn’t easy. We had to initially invest over a million dollars in resources to find our first 1,000 or so research subjects. Along the way, we learned something fascinating. There are probably millions of people around the world who experience Fundamental Wellbeing, if not tens of millions.

They’re all over the place, often hiding in plain sight choosing not to let others know – because often they aren’t around anyone else who experiences what they do, and they learn very quickly that when they start to talk about how they experience the world that other people find it weird. So they just shut up and go about living their lives.

As our project started to become well known, more and more of them began to contact us to volunteer for our initial study. Soon we had more than we needed, or could even handle. Even more of them arrive in our inbox, day in and day out.

There is truly no shortage of people who experience Fundamental Wellbeing, and our data shows that there has been an increase in people transitioning since around 1996. We attribute this to the moment where the internet had matured to the point to facilitate an entirely new level of global information sharing, which included information about Fundamental Wellbeing.

We currently estimate that about 1/2 of a percent of the population experience it in developed nations, but that could be a significant underestimate – as I’ll discuss in the next the second myth.