Glocal Spectrum
Hey beautiful people,
My buddy Dayne Rathbone, the co-founder of Letter, has a message for The Stoa community. They are launching a new initiative in service to make seemingly impossible conversations become possible. They’d like our help sourcing some suggestions via this survey. Below is a 3-minute video from Dayne explaining the initiative.
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing: The Eros of The Stoa w/ Peter Limberg, Ria Baeck, and Bonnitta Roy. January 24th @ 12:00 PM ET. Patreon event.
Diaflogos w/ Tyson Wagner. Every Sunday @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 min.
Newly posted event:
Stealing the Culture with Dialogos: Female Rivalry w/ Raven Connolly, Maybe Gray, Tarn Rodgers Johns, and Aella. February 18th @ 2:00 PM ET. Patreon event.
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January 23rd, 2021
It feels like the right move to start putting more events behind a Patreon “giftwall.” I am hoping it helps with the quality control of attendees, as I am noticing more random people coming to events, with no sense of the established culture or protocols. As this place grows, we’ll get more of that. And the deliciousness that this steward has in store for The Stoa, this place will be growing.
Of course, the added benefit of having more patrons is a nice thing for me, and it is encouraging me to give more to patrons. I want to do my best to dodge any transactional feelings, and I think not having a tier system works for that. Someone can gift as little as $1 to get behind the giftwall, and enjoy the events happening there.
It makes sense for the “wisdom gym” and “communal podcasts” to be open for all though, and perhaps the “sensemaking in residence” series as well, but I am not sure about that yet. The first patron-only event starts tomorrow, and from March 21st—when this place started—to today, all of the events have been offered for free. This place was a child of COVID, and it felt wrong to charge anything during a pandemic.
We have 333 recorded sessions up on the YouTube channel, and we have more non-recorded events per week than recorded ones, so I’d say we probably had between 600-800 events since this thing started. All for free. That is fucking ridiculous actually, in comparison to other spaces out there.
Shaheer, one of my mentees who hosted an event at our recent “The Unsuccess Symposium,” is totally not into any of the fancy metamodern intellectual stuff. He is into practical stuff, doing sales and real estate, and is starting to get into self-help literature. In short, he is in the “Game A” hustle, where I think he should be, and he does not have a sense of the scene The Stoa is playing in. He attended the symposium, and texted me during the events …
Shaheer: Are these events free?
Me: Yeah. Free.
Shaheer: I’m baffled. *multiple fire emojis*
It was good to receive that outside perspective, because from his world, this place must seem ridiculous. I was chatting with a high-discerning semi-regular, and he said the amount of free things The Stoa offers is absurd. There was a period in December where there was a sense of entitlement and ingratitude in the air—coming from a small cohort of regulars—a few of whom had a bitter nastiness in their approach. This made me question the “everything for free” spirit of this place.
Working my ass off to the point of burn-out, while giving a gift that feels pure, and being super vulnerable in the process, to then get uncharitably slapped with nasty energy directed at me? Yeah, that was not fun. It hurt in the right way though, because it was a good learning moment. My intuitions about certain things and about certain people were revealed to be true, which has given me greater confidence in trusting the daemon.
This also turned my attention to the livelihood question, which has not been on my mind since the summer, when I was considering returning to the normie work world. Those thoughts returned at the end of December. I still might return to normie work, but there are financial opportunities and collaborations that have emerged outside The Stoa, thanks to The Stoa, that are daemonically aligned.
As well, my entrepreneurial mind and spirit have come online in the last few days, in a hard way. Perhaps because I have received such a positive response from the coaching offerings, all of my dormant entrepreneurial ideas that I was toying with during my normie work career are rushing back.
I like the idea of having one foot in the gift economy and one foot in the market economy, while working towards “financial independence,” à la Early Retirement Extreme. Becoming resilient, in all domains of life, and emancipating ourselves from Empire, is the wise way to go in my opinion.
Of course, none of us can completely escape from Empire, because it is a power that is interconnected to everything. We can free our minds though, by becoming live players. We can also free our time, by gaining financial independence. And we can partly free our bodies, by living in intentional communities like the Monastic Academy, or developing Smart Villages, or living in smaller towns, or by having bug-out properties.
We cannot fully free our bodies though, because an Empire collapse is an existential risk, and we’d all be pretty fucked, as most of us cannot escape the apocalypse by purchasing bunkers in New Zealand. This is why I think we should be on what I call the “glocal spectrum,” which I talked about at a Metagame Mastermind. It is a spectrum that consists of cleaning your room on one end, to being deployed towards resolving the meta-crisis on the other end.
My daemonic inspired projects are more clearly bifurcating in my mind now. A part of them will be situated in the gift economy, and another part will be situated in the market economy, each with their distinct offerings. Both will be on the glocal spectrum though, in service towards stealing this culture.
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Receive coaching from Peter and other facilitators at The Stoa: thestoa.ca/coaches