Interesting Times
Hello,
Dialogos has been added to the Wisdom Gym! Every other Tuesday. Exciting. :)
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie.Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Chapel Perilous w/ Rebecca Fox. Every Sunday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Memetic Mediation Campfire w/ Jason Snyder and Jared Janes. Every Sunday @ 3:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 20, 2020
May you live in interesting times.
Ostensibly a blessing, this expression is apparently a curse. Uninteresting times are safe, predictable, and normal. Interesting times are dangerous, uncertain, and weird. It seems we are living in interesting times with a trajectory of it becoming more interesting.
You turn on the news and the world seems to have gone mad and if the news is your only source of news you’ll think there are only riots, racists, and fuckwits who do not give a shit. Legacy media is captured completely by narrative warfare and us in this “sensemaking web” are feeling like we are entering an epistemic no man’s land.
I do not want to listen to noise and news these days is noise, but this is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. There is a meta-crisis, and people are not talking about that, hence people are not responding to that. How can us Stoics respond to that?
Samo Burja, who has a Live Players series at the Stoa every Thursday, makes the distinction between live players and dead players: A live player is a person or a tightly coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or a group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.
Stoics are live players, but I have been struggling to feel like one today. Thumos is always bubbling up, but I do not feel like I am riding it well enough. I want to be go go go again. I want to risk my sanity for the whole again. I want to bleed at the knife's edge again.
There is a lot to create, but maybe I need to take a break, and find balance. I struggle in finding balance.
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