Coming to Terms
Hello friends,
Today was pretty epic at The Stoa: Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke, and Akira the Don all visited. Tomorrow is going to be even more epic …
First, we start with our weekly Stoic Hustle where we work together on the shit we need to get done, then we have a short film screening on the What is Emerging? series with Maria Clara Parente. This is followed by a session on Governance Futurism from the boys at Palladium Magazine. We end the day by getting stoned with the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi.
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. Every Tuesday @ 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.*
What is Emerging? w/ Maria Clara Parente. July 7th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Governance Futurism w/ Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton. July 7th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Stoned at the Stoa w/ Caveh Zahedi. July 7th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
*Watch a presentation on the practice here. You can come and leave as you leave throughout the 5 hours.
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July 6, 2020
The person who messaged me saying that I was being unbecoming when I was critical of the Modern Stoicism movement emailed me in response to my recent unpacking of the word unbecoming.
I met this person in Athens during the last international Stoicon conference, and she recently discovered Stoicism, which she has greatly benefited from. She said the reason why she does not engage with The Stoa is because when she tries to understand it she feels stupid. She said that the language we use seems unnecessarily complex, wrapped in mystery, and not welcoming of new members.
This person is not stupid, and a lot of other people who are definitely not stupid get turned off by this sensemaking web for the same reason. David Fuller has been concerned about this aspect, and he is trying to make this space more accessible via Rebel Wisdom. I never took that approach, mainly because I am not good at making things accessible.
Or maybe I can be. I am pretty good at code-switching, and when I was doing training for Dale Carnegie Training I was not talking about the fucking meta-crisis or the liminal war in front of a group of business professionals. I talked simply, like Dale Carnegie himself advocated. So yeah, I can make things accessible, so why do I use these unrelatable terms?
Is it a desire to signal how smart I am? Maybe, but this does not resonate. I do not identify with my intelligence and I do not think I am that intelligent, especially compared to some of the people I speak with in this space, e.g. John Vervaeke, Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, etc.
Maybe my proclivity to use unrelatable terms is residue from overcompensating from not feeling intelligent, and struggling during school, a signalling strategy that stuck. This seems more plausible, but it is probably prudent to explore my current proclivity for using these types of terms.
There is a certain aesthetic quality I find, and a mental high I receive, when I come across a new term. They also serve as mental shorthand to explain a complex process, which serves practical purposes in conversation with those in the know. This is also probably coupled with intellectual laziness, and a lack of desire to proselytize ideas.
I do not find the exclusionary effects bothersome. Having an attraction to foreign terms, and not getting hijacked by insecurities of intellectual inadequacies when seeing one, seems to attract a certain temperament. I find people who have this temperament are my people, as I tend to vibe with them. So maybe using these types of terms is serving as a tribal selection process for myself in this space.
I also think it helps with avoiding culture war noise and cancel culture bullshit. When you get meta, there is an escape velocity effect, where you start to get meta about meta, then you get meta about that. I am guessing that there is no entry point when they come across this, so instead they shut down and turn away.
I do often zone out myself and get exhausted by the galaxy brains in this space though, and do not know what the hell they are talking about half the time. So I do appreciate the need to make these ideas more accessible. David wants to do a piece about memetic mediation, and The Stoa, to talk about it being a space where important conversations can happen.
If I am going to appear on Rebel Wisdom again, or another channel that has wide reach, I am going to want to sound coherent, and it will be expected of me to sound accessible, which is going to take practice. I feel so forgone from my normie speak at the moment, and I feel a resistance towards attempting it.
While I can code-switch and talk about self-help platitudes when I am training, and I can do so genuinely, I experience a lack of aliveness if I do that too often. I also have not put much thought into how a concept like memetic mediation can be expressed in a broadcast way, so that it can speak to the “mainstream,” whatever that means.
It feels like I’ll have to talk like a politician if I attempt this. Maybe I can do this though and maybe I should do this? I do not know. I also have another desire to keep my profile small so I do not get bombarded by noise, but still receive the fruits of having some status and recognition.
I’ll take things slow. I do not want to compromise my authenticity in order to be more accessible, but if I think what is going on at The Stoa is important, and if I think more people will benefit from it, then I will have to speak and write in a more accessible manner. In a previous entry I did write: In order to change the world, we need to be able to speak with many people, and not down at them.
This still resonates but I am conflicted. I like the “find the others then cohere with them” approach that The Stoa is currently taking and at the moment I do not feel like I am the man for the “make this shit accessible” job.
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