Hello beautiful people,
FYI. Tyson’s Flowing With Unknowingness event is canceled today. It will be back next week after the Metamodern Stoicism with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
Tomorrow’s EPIC events:
Playing the Infinite Game During the Meaning Crisis w/ James Carse and John Vervaeke. August 18th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Sand Talk w/ Tyson Yunkaporta. August 18th @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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August 17, 2020
It is a little after 5:30 AM and I am sensing into what to write about while sipping on my espresso.
I am back from a one-week vacation with Camille. We go to my family cottage every summer and usually lounge around and indulge, and we did some of that, but this time we talked a lot about our lives together: our finances, having children, and where to live. It dawned on us that we were living like mindless zombies, with a fuzzy plan to address these things.
There was no talk about jazzy memes like the meta-crisis or the meaning crisis. We were talking about practical things, and practical things are hard enough. They were humbling talks. Here I am going all cowboy here with The Stoa, without having this essential stuff figured out.
We decided it is time for me to return to the normie work world, at least temporarily. It does not feel right collapsing The Stoa into some “Game A” monetization model like other podcasts do: advertisements, spin-off courses, membership paywalls, etc. People are asking me to sell merchandise and I am warming up to stuff like that and I’ll continue to gently ask for support via Patreon, but that is as far as I am willing to go for now.
I do not want to corrupt the spirit of this thing. One day my dream of opening a philosophical coffee shop might emerge, that is something I will discover by wisely listening to the daemon. In the meantime, I have to attend to other things.
I was talking to Bonnitta yesterday and we talked about what makes The Stoa interesting: not knowing what it is. She said it is an experiment and I think that is the most accurate framing. This thing got launched during our collective moment of radical uncertainty and I started experiencing all these strange things. An extreme amount of libidinous and daemonic energy was flowing through me, and this thing got created.
It was like COVID afforded a brief moment, an existential opening to use Andrew’s phrase, where the daemon attempted a prison break. Something new wants to emerge here and I want to help midwife it into existence, but I sense it is time for me to take a less focal role, and fade into the background. In a previous entry I wrote: I will be here, as long as I am needed, and no longer.
I most likely will not be writing here anymore. I know I was wavering on this and I really like writing so the truth bleeds out. I am an authenticity pervert and I do like bleeding real in front of you. It takes a lot of time to write though, and I need these mornings now, when my mind is fresh with espresso, to apply to jobs. I also sense it is good for my personal thoughts to be separated from The Stoa. How much do you really need to read about my never-ending existential crisis anyway?
This summer might have been an illusion for all of us. There was a feeling that things are “returning to normal” with businesses opening up. There could be multiple waves of COVID coming our way though, along with their second-order effects. The meta-crisis is just warming up and unsurprisingly Culture War 2.0 has become an absolute memetic shitshow. I am buckling up for September and October to get really ugly.
If you glance at upcoming events for The Stoa you will see a lot of exciting sessions. You will continue to see this, and I sense the space will get some buzz in the next few months. I will be launching a Discord server soon, so the collective intelligence can start doing its thing.
I am going to slowly get out of the way now. This phase of The Stoa is going to be about you listening to the daemon. I will still be here though, bleeding real with you.
***
Support The Stoa @ https://www.patreon.com/the_stoa
ah Peter, yes the corruption of the commons, I broke it too.
Repair Café is a tickle of an idea that exploded into great progress, so a café is always good.
I just bought one of the few remaining freezers for sale, they are going quickly for good reason as we slip from healthy food even further, ‘how can we not?’
I gave up my capitalism ways 10 yrs ago to study economics and where it comes from, kind of a ‘why not?’ question, if things don’t work, same with a virus, university videos on the virus, its all there, we don’t need politics at all, how stupid we have become, just to hear baby talk about the flu bug. Yay 1 billion virus in one litre of sea water, stuff like that!
I don’t have money to join rebel wisdom, but maybe I don’t want the effort to participate, my friend Douglas said he felt very awkward on the group thing, so I would be terrified.
I love to write though, it is new for me, I used to do everything in my head or by drawing and sketches.
Curiosity got me, 5 is a fist was such a long road to figure out, then there is the invention of zero and human numbers, I am not even sure if these things are in any dialogue, it troubles me no end that these things are not discussed, or the spiral of earth chasing after the sun. The significance is amazing should we care to think deeper in physics, not witchcraft.