Coaches in Resonance
Hello beautiful people,
We have a new offering at The Stoa …
This offering will last until the end of February. You can book a session here: www.thestoa.ca/coaches
Tomorrow’s event:
How René Girard Helps Us to Understand Our World w/ Wolfgang Palaver. January 19th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted event:
Coaches in Resonance w/ Peter Limberg, A.J. Bond, and Tyson Wagner. February 1st @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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January 18th, 2021
It is ten minutes after 5 AM. I am not fully awake, but somehow pushed through the tiredness to make an espresso. I have taken two sips already, and a song is playing that I have never heard before. A good start.
It is dark outside, and Socrates, who wakes up beside me in his little bed, begs to go outside in the morning. It is cold, but he does not care. He wants adventure. It is his nature. I want adventure as well. It is my nature.
There is no shortage of opportunities for adventure this year. We are all in it now. Somebody is surely going to try to profit off collapse, roping it into the spectacle, and we can become consumers of it, and be pacified in the face of our collective challenges, not to mention personal ones.
I have been reflecting on Mark Fisher’s “Capital Realism,” and according to Fisher, the essence of capital realism can be summed up in this quote: it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. The idea is simple: in our intersubjective consciousness capitalism is the only system, and we cannot imagine any alternatives.
There are some symptoms of this, “reflexive impotence” being one. As Fisher writes:
It is reflexive impotence that you hear in the Arctic Monkeys - yes, they know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge', that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And guess what? They probably know that too.
The recursive self-fulfilling prophecy of the meta-crisis: reactionaries call this being blackpilled, and sadly there is no imagination in this. It is our trauma being recuperated into a game we never wanted to play. It is easier to be a dead player, and consume deathworks, and rest in the certainty that things are fucked-up, as there is comfort in certainty, but I say fuck that.
Today is supposed to be “Blue Monday,” the most depressing day of the year, which is a claim that is apparently bogus. I think these reflexive impotence inducing black pills of the meta-crisis are also bogus. If you feel into our zeitgeist, there is an opening, aporia is flooding in, along with existential hope.
Today we are soft-launching a “Coaches in Resonance” series at The Stoa with A.J. Bond, Tyson Wagner, and myself. We will be providing one-on-one coaching sessions, in the spirit of the gift economy. And with the spirit of existential hope, I will continue to listen to what is most alive, in myself and in others.
We just need an opening, to give us a glimpse of a new game to play.
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