Personally, I like long-form articles and I like articles by metamodern thinker Joe Lightfoot. Below are links to two of his recent articles and I highly recommend reading them in full in the original. And I also recognize that time is precious and that there is intense competition for our attention, hence this offering to my readers.

Integrative Archetypes: A Menagerie Of Liminal Luminaries - Part One

Integrative Archetypes (Part Two)

I loaded Joe’s articles into my NotebookLM, generated the following summaries, bolded phrases that I want to emphasize and added a few of my own comments.

Overview

Integrative Archetypes are subpersonalities or personas that specifically arise within the Integrative Worldview, a perspective characterized by its "meta" nature and its focus on seeing the system as a whole. This worldview values the synthesis of wisdom from various other cultural paradigms to reach novel insights and new ways of understanding the world. The sources describe these archetypes as a "menagerie of liminal luminaries" inspired by a network of thinkers often called "The Liminal Web".

(In everyday English, the word menagerie is frequently used as a metaphor to describe a varied, vibrant, and sometimes chaotic mix of people, personalities, or objects.)

1. The Meta Monk

The Meta Monk is a modern-day spiritual seeker who blends ancient religious traditions with current psychological science. Instead of acting like a distant authority figure, they serve as a "guide on the side" to help others grow through shared practice. Their goal is to update traditional institutions, like monasteries or congregations, to make them useful places for finding wisdom and stillness in today’s busy, high-tech world. They often switch between dedicated spiritual retreats and regular daily life, working hard to bridge the gap between strict mental and ethical habits and the pressures of modern capitalism.

2. The Bard Of Belonging

The Bard of Belonging is a social experimenter who focuses on how we connect and relate to one another in the modern world. They act like "human traffic controllers" for our social lives, helping to build new kinds of communities, organizations, and even updated versions of religion that fit our 21st-century lifestyle. Their main goal is to heal the deep, secret loneliness many people feel today by creating safe spaces where it is normal to "share what it's like to be us" and work through old emotional tensions. They carefully balance welcoming diverse people with making sure a group is strong and focused enough to actually support its members. By building these deep human bonds, they aim to create a "collective blooming" of support that protects our mental health against the rising tide of digital isolation and AI.

As a teenager, I was intensely lonely and often depressed, a story I tell in My Diary.

3. The Enlightened Developmentalist

The Enlightened Developmentalist is a person who uses psychological and developmental "maps" to understand human growth while constantly reminding themselves that "the map is not territory". They are inspired by models that highlight personal and collective strengths, yet they practice "epistemic humility" by acknowledging that these theories are often incomplete and likely contain significant blind spots. Unlike traditional experts who might feel superior, they are deeply aware of the "dark history" of these models being used for discrimination and work hard to avoid acting like a "guru". They strive to see every individual as an endlessly surprising mystery rather than just a stage in a model, treating everyone with equal dignity and respect. Ultimately, they balance their interest in human potential with a cautious awareness that humanity may not yet be wise enough to use these rankings without causing more harm than good.

4. The Sleeper Agent

The Sleeper Agent is a practical reformer who works inside the mainstream business world instead of staying on the spiritual or academic sidelines. They act as "world bridgers" who take deep, regenerative ideas and translate them into everyday actions that help make late-stage capitalism kinder and more curious. By reaching positions of power in traditional companies, they use their influence to quietly spread wisdom and shift the culture from within. While they look and speak like typical professionals, they maintain private rituals to ensure they do not lose their true selves. Ultimately, they are willing to sacrifice being seen as "cool" or "revolutionary" so they can focus on the long-term work of funding future-focused projects and guiding society toward a better future.

Rather than failing or freezing in Game A, we need many more Sleeper Agents.

5. The Neo Shamanic

The Neo Shamanic is a bridge-builder who connects ancient ancestral wisdom with our fast-moving, high-tech modern world. They act as "cultural re-wilders," using new rituals and artful communication to bring a sense of wonder and the sacred back into everyday life. While they are deeply familiar with mystical traditions, they keep one foot firmly planted in science and reason to stay grounded. Their main goal is to help people move past the numbness of modern life and reconnect with their deeper selves and the planet. By sensing the "energy" of a room and guiding people through life’s big changes, they work to heal 21st-century anxieties and ensure that spiritual power is used safely and responsibly.

6. The Regenerative Decentralist

The Regenerative Decentralist is a digital pioneer who builds new systems for power and money that do not depend on a single central authority. They view online communities and decentralized groups as living organisms that can work together like a "hive mind" to solve complex problems and distribute resources fairly. By rebuilding the "plumbing" of our world through cooperatives, open-source projects, and shared land trusts, they work to protect our privacy and freedom from large, extractive institutions. They balance being "high tech" with being "high touch," ensuring they stay grounded in nature and human connection while using advanced digital tools. Ultimately, they aim to replace our current competitive economy with a fairer system where abundance is shared and decisions are made by the local communities they actually affect.

7. The Heterodox Theory Artist

The Heterodox Theory Artist treats the creation and testing of ideas as a deeply moral and creative act, viewing theory-making as a metaphysical performance rather than just a dry academic exercise. They are experts at navigating contradictions and refuse to settle for the "bloodless" certainty of modern institutions or simple techno-optimism. Instead of cold, clinical analysis, they advocate for "sympathetic immersion"—using music, poetry, and myth to grasp deep truths that a purely scientific lens might miss. They are hard to categorize on any political spectrum because they can defend the virtues of tradition while simultaneously offering its most blistering critiques. Ultimately, they strive to keep human existence "electric" and alive, embracing desire and mystery to prevent our spiritual struggles from being flattened by a modern, mechanistic world.

8. The Earth Mother Resurgent

The Earth Mother Resurgent represents a return of ancient, nature-based wisdom that many in the modern world have forgotten or dismissed. She acts as a powerful bridge, synthesizing ecological awareness, indigenous traditions, and a deep physical presence to help "re-enchant" our lives. Instead of fighting against others, she focuses on partnership and integration, believing that healthy societies grow when we embrace our differences rather than competing. She works to heal generational wounds and restore a sense of "unarmored love" that is both soft and strong. Ultimately, she reminds us that we are all interconnected—linking ancestors, children, and the future—and provides a felt sense that life, when cared for, will always produce more than it consumes.

For me personally, The Earth Mother Resurgent is the archetypes I am currently most interested in and one of the reasons I convened Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism.

I used my NotebookLM to add to Joe’s work.

9. The Hospice Midwife

The Hospice Midwife is a "post-tragic" figure who accepts that many of our current global systems are reaching their end and chooses to act from a place of deep, grounded reality. They have fully faced the "poignant melancholy" of our time, refusing to hide in denial or get stuck in paralyzing despair. Instead of trying to "save" an extractive world that is already crumbling, they focus on "hospicing" the old ways with dignity while simultaneously midwifing the new possibilities that are starting to emerge. They turn their awareness of the "shrouded darkness" of the unknown into a "steady and loving resolve," acting as a calm presence who helps others stay compassionate and focused as traditional structures fail. By letting go of the need for easy answers or guaranteed success, they find the "exquisite hope" necessary to build local resilience, protect the commons, and plant seeds for a future they may never personally see.

I instructed my AI to use Sarah Wilson as an example without naming her, reserving that right for myself. Yesterday I posted How to Live Fully in a Collapsing World. I have now begun reading her book and I will probably have lots more to say in coming weeks.

Several times per week I walk on my treadmill and listen to podcasts. I have lots to choose from since I follow many channels. And I carefully monitor what captures my attention.

Recently I listened to two people with a strong metamodern vibe in conversation together.

Stop Chasing the Matrix: How to Live Fully in a Collapsing World (w/ Sarah Wilson

If building a better future looks like a miserable exercise in self-denial, nobody is going to join.

Rushkoff sits down with author and activist Sarah Wilson to discuss her new book, 'I Eat the Stars"

Together, they discuss why environmental and activist movements have been weighed down by guilt, and why the alternative to industrial capitalism has to look, feel, and be better than the status quo.

From trading excessive belongings for time-freedom to prioritizing deep local community, it turns out that simplifying is a hell of a lot more fun than chasing a zillion dollars on the stock market.

Recently I wrote about my preparation for Sarah Wilson’s book which I expect to receive tomorrow.

We are but star dust

In anticipation of getting to know Sarah Wilson better, I recently read First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Memoir of Self-Discovery and I hope to find time soon to write a book report.

The video version and transcript for the podcast, which I have lightly edited for clarity, are available on YouTube.

Sarah Wilson: Yeah. Margaret Wheatley… writes about the idea of building islands of sanity. You know, we’ve got to build these islands of sanity where people as they start to kind of step into a type of collapse awareness have somewhere to go, right? They can see beacons out there who are getting on with the next way of being that is delightful, you know? And so that’s the work I think that we’re a lot of people are starting to do at the moment… we all have to live as fully as we can within the confines that we’ve been given.

I became collapse aware and collapse accepting in 2019. Now I am becoming collapse activated, trying to live well and do something positive in the face of the rising probability of collapse. We need islands of coherence that become islands of sanity as conditions worsen so that people have somewhere to go.

Wilson: I know that there’s a lot of people who are at a point where they’re seeing what’s happening in the world and this idea of systems collapse is starting to really make sense. You know, they’re they’re seeing it, they’re living it, we’re in it. You know, it’s all very very meta. And um, it’s a very hard thing just speaking of this idea of letting go of the scale concept. It’s really hard as an activist to accept that change is going to have to occur at a localized intimate level and to trust that the emergent properties that are embedded in those kind of dynamics will do their thing.

Yes, a growing number of people have a strong feeling that something is very wrong and our leaders are not telling us what it is (because most of them are still captured by Modernity and they are not yet collapse aware).

Wilson: And there’s three entities that are that are up for it, right? There’s the death or the collapse of the system and not just one system but the complex system of complex systems that make up the post-industrial civilization that is going down no matter what.

Understanding Modernity as a complex system of complex systems is why we have a metacrisis, a predicament rather than a problem.

Wilson: So that brings me to the two, other deaths. There’s the our own individual death and I think you know ultimately that’s what we all fear. The death of ourselves and our immediate family, our children, perhaps our parents and so on. And then there’s the death of humanity of our entire species and maybe some additional species on the way down. And those two latter deaths, I don’t think we have to do right like they don’t have to be part of this first death and the choice is ours collectively you know and whether the whole thing goes down depends and I sort of say this a lot in the book on how we handle it you know if we can handle this if we can hold what’s going on if we can have a mature outlook and we can you know soften the blow move with it, simplify. Now, then we not only have a great chance of saving humanity, we have a great chance of taking humanity to its next level of maturity and evolution, which is I think what this is all about. And this is something that I have been nervous to talk about previously. You know, in the writing of the book, my deep sense has been that this is going somewhere. You know, my mother came to me. I came out to Australia while I was writing the book and you know we were sitting on the front deck and um she said Sarah I don’t understand you know my mother struggles with all of my work you know um she she has to disappear after one of my books comes out cuz it’s just too overwhelming for her and she said I don’t understand you’re writing about these incredibly frightening ideas but you seem happier than than you’ve ever been before…

This is a remarkable part of the podcast. Our awareness and acceptance of our own death, the death of Modernity and the possible death of humanity as a species are related. But we can still be activated with radical hope. And we can personally be happy and thrive for now.

I have concern that many people are not ready for what Sarah Wilson is bringing to the mainstream with her new book and that such people do not have somewhere to go.

I am now reading i eat the stars and this link takes you to my book report on my personal website.

And while I still love Substack, I also have concerns and frustrations that I will share.

I found An Open Letter to Chris Best, CEO of Substack because I follow Susan Harley. She restacked your article so it landed in my Notes feed. I follow Susan because she has been “Collapse Aware for 23 years”.

Robert, you write,

But lately, many creators are sensing a drift.

This has not been my experience but, if true, it is a serious concern.

There is something important about the Substack Notes feed that you did not mention in your article. It has two options—Following and For You— which, as a reader, I much appreciate. I spend most of my time in the Notes feed which has content only from people I choose to follow. When I go to the other feed, I do so with awareness that the Substack algorithm is at play. So far, that feed has not been problematic for me.

For creators, and for anyone, to believe that Substack exists primarily to serve creators is extremely naive. Substack is primarily a for profit business, a fact that it does not hide. The primary purpose of Substack is to generate a return on investment for its shareholders which it does by serving creators much better than other platforms.

But I do have a concern about where Substack may go in the future. The current business model will stop growing at some point but it seems we are not there yet. However, the pressure to keep growing will not stop. How will Substack change in the future? What has happened with other platforms gives us no comfort.

I am aware that Andreessen Horowitz are investors in Substack. Marc Andreessen is one of several billionaires who grealy concern me. So far, so far he does not seem to be putting pressure on Substack to change in ways that Writers and Readers would find upsetting.

Now I will share my two biggest frustrations with Substack.

I can very easily find an abundance of very good content, more than I can absorb. I cycle between growing and purging. I Subscribe to Substacks of interest and overwhelm myself, then purge. I follow more and more people, then purge. This is a nice problem to have and I do not expect Substack to fix it, to fix me.

My second frustration is paywalls. As a senior citizen with limited financial resources, I need to think carefully about my spending. There are at least a hundred writes that I would love to support financially even if I did not have the time to read their content. Again, I do not expect Substack to fix it, to fix me.

Robert,

A quick-hit AI-generated reaction gets four hundred.

I do not understand how this is happening. As best as I can discern, I am getting almost no AI generated content in my feeds. And I generate AI content for myself at times and I have high trust in my own intuition to spot such writing.

Notes increasingly dominate the culture and energy of the platform.

So why not simply avoid the For You Notes feed?

…reshaping Substack into something that feels uncomfortably close to Facebook, X, TikTok, or every other endless-scroll feed competing for human attention.

Pay attention to attention and intention, especially your own.

Rather than blaming Substack for our own lack of self-control, let’s encourage everyone to become more self-aware and more mindful as they scroll.

Another concern creators discuss constantly is discoverability, especially for smaller writers.

I am the convenor of a new Substack, Final Waive Feminism. Recently I have been looking for small writers with interesting things to say about feminism. My research skills on Substack are very undeveloped. Yet with only a little work, I have once again begun to overwhelm myself with good content in a very narrow area. I do not expect Substack to help me find smaller writes.

Robert, I find your criticism of Substack provocative and perhaps that is your real intention. Be provocative, capture attention and grow. But I did not find your article very useful. See, now I am being provocative. And I hope some people begin following me and my three Substacks, all very small. And FYI, I have two profiles on Substack. Follow the crumbs. Check my links.

For me, writing helps me gain clarity as I actualize my intuition. It feels right to me at this time to focus less on metamodernism and more on feminism, less on the voices of men and more on the voices of women. Rather the moving away from something, I sense I am moving towards something.

A woman of growing interest to me is Sarah Wilson. I first became aware of her last year when I discovered the Collapse Book. I have purchased I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World which is scheduled for release on June 16, 2026, can’t wait.

In anticipation of getting to know Sarah Wilson better, I recently read First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Memoir of Self-Discovery and I hope to find time soon to write a book report.

In First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, a raw and honest memoir about anxiety, Wilson directs her intense focus and fierce investigating skills onto her lifetime companion, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism of her own experiences with conditions like bipolar disorder and OCD.

A friend of mine who is a psychotherapist remarked that this is the best book on anxiety that she has ever read. From my personal experience with anxiety and based on my many years as a volunteer in the mental health field in Canada, I agree. And I love stories that deeply share lived experience.

Now I would like to riff on an article Wilson posted a few weeks ago.

Men, this revolution will not be incentivised!

…a lot more men do indeed need to be educated in all the ways that the material, colonialist, linear, patriarchal system is no longer serving them or anyone else.

Sarah Wilson has the metamodern vibe. We understand that our current civilization is not sustainable and not allowing most of us to thrive. But the men fighting hard to perpetuate modernity need an education, most of which will probably come from the school of hard knocks.

My full response to the guy standing at the QnA mic was looping and passionate, bordering on fierce. It’s a series of points that are familiar to me now; I’ve had to draw on them so often. I figured it was time to put them here in writing and get your thoughts.

I am noticing, and liking, the rising intensity in the voices of women.

Why men should quit the need to own and leverage stuff that should just be done and shared and got on with

Yes, in the SPACE it seems men want to own the projects and what we get is Fragmentation.

…And don’t expect anyone to hand you a business plan for the revolution.

From a woman I learned that a good way to move forward is to simply look for the next elegant step.

The only way forward now is small, right, enmeshed, collaborative, right moves made by everyone for good, noble, humble pro-human reasons.

Men want to go big but it seems we first need to go small.

Of course, the most important “catch up” work ahead for men in this moment is the long, thankless slog of reckoning with their gender, and the mythology attached to it - the mythology that tells them they can and should own moments and movements… and the rest. Women have been doing this slog for more than a century. Feminism saw women grapple with the question of womanhood. Men now needs to do the same with manhood.

Men’s work is important but that is not mine to do. Currently, I am helping with building an online community. And together, WE have launched a new Substack, Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism.

The content creators of FWF are all members of the Wisdom Exchange. This online community was launched by Claudia Dommaschk in December, 2023. Built at the speed of trust, the member roster currently has 25 people with the majority being men.

Dear Nate,

THANK YOU for your honesty.

Non-Duality and Our Living World | Frankly 144

In this week’s Frankly, Nate discusses his long-running attempt to understand non-duality, and why this concept has remained just out of his grasp despite years of conversations with teachers, thinkers, and podcast guests. He begins with a personal reflection on the possibility that his difficulty understanding non-duality does not stem from lack of intelligence or a short attention span, but from the particular cultural operating system that Westerners seem to inherit from birth. This operating system – which appears everywhere from language to economics to institutions – reinforces separation between the subject and the object, the observer and the observed, the self and the world. It trains us to experience ourselves as isolated individuals standing apart from the living systems that sustain us.

Nate, you do not understand non-duality and neither do I. Better said, we do not understand non-duality from personal experience. Are we really missing out?

Perhaps non-duality is a word like God or Source. Perhaps it is a thing that is not a thing but yet is something that cannot be fully captured with words. Perhaps non-duality is something important connected to the human predicament.

Perhaps AI can help us find some words.

I used a tip from an article, Keeping Humans at the Center of AI, by Claudia Dommaschk who in turn got the suggestion from Audrey Tang.

PROMPT

In one long paragraph, present fairly all stakeholder viewpoints about non-duality and the uncommon ground that bridges them.

RESPONSE PER PERPLEXITY AI

Traditional Advaita Vedanta and strict non-dual teachers believe reality is fundamentally one single consciousness (called Brahman) and that the world of separate things and people is basically an illusion (maya); they say true freedom comes only from realizing this oneness and dissolving the false sense of a separate self. Buddhist Madhyamaka and middle-way practitioners push back, saying that claiming any ultimate “one thing” (even consciousness) is itself a rigid belief that creates problems; they argue non-duality means not sticking to any fixed idea about reality, including monism, and instead seeing how everything depends on everything else without claiming there’s one underlying substance. Embodied non-duality teachers and trauma-informed spiritual guides warn that teachings focused only on transcendent awareness can make people feel disconnected from their bodies, emotions, and individuality; they say true non-dual realization should deepen your sense of self rather than erase it, help you feel more alive in your body, and heal relationships by experiencing unity while still being fully present as a person. Scientific researchers studying non-dual experience suggest we don’t have to choose between materialism and spirituality—they see mind and matter as two sides of the same reality, which lets us study experience without getting stuck on whether what’s “inside” is different from what’s “outside.” The common ground across all these views is that thinking in rigid either/or categories (separate vs. one, mind vs. matter) creates suffering, and real freedom comes from direct experience that goes beyond fixed ideas—whether that’s experiencing oneness, letting go of all beliefs, feeling fully present in the body, or sensing the unity behind apparent differences; all these paths agree that even clinging to “non-duality” as a fixed idea blocks the very freedom people are seeking.

Well, that clears it up.

Nate, a few weeks ago you had a conversation with Sam Harris who knows a thing or two about non-duality. Perhaps he can help us. Perhaps not.

Finding Calm in the Storm through Awareness and Meditation with Sam Harris | TGS 216

There might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on the student, but once the truth of nonduality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was always available—and there was never any doubt about how to see it again.

Harris, Sam. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (p. 135). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Sam Harris changed the trajectory of my life. More accurately, his book had significant impact on me but not Harris himself. In 2014 I was not fully satisfied with my secular humanist worldview and Waking Up sparked my interest in secular spirituality for which I remain grateful to this day as my journey continues.

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion—and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation. Once again, I am suggesting an experiment that you must conduct for yourself, in the laboratory of your own mind, by paying attention to your experience in a new way.

Harris, Sam. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (p. 82). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Nate, I noticed something in your conversation with Sam Harris. You asked a lot of questions and he had a lot of answers. You learned a lot from him. But Harris had no questions for you. He learned nothing from you. Frankly, a lovely word, I was more impressed with you, someone without a non-dual experience, than with Harris and his lifetime of meditation and collapsing the illusion of the self.

I actually experience Sam Harris as having a big ego, a big important Self, a very intelligent man with huge blind spots. I experience you, Nate, as far more open and humble. My wish for you is that you keep the Self you are and may you never understand non-duality.

Is the Self an illusion? Yes. Is the Self an illusion? No. These are both stories, human constructs. Personally, I prefer the Self story over the No-Self story. Are we connected to everything? Yes. Are we connected to everything? No. The No-Self story is actually, imo, harmful to many who are lonely, unable to shake the feeling that they are a separate self and always will be.

I find the idea that humanity is a part of Nature rather than separate from Nature easy to understand. You and I did not need a non-dual experience to reach this conclusion. Your work, Nate, is more meaningful to me than the contributions of Sam Harris, who I mostly ignore these days.

Are we all of one substance? Yes. We are stardust, a useful and probably true story. Is there a deeper layer below this? Is consciousness fundamental? That is a story currently gaining a lot of ground but not with me. What is fundamental? I DO NOT KNOW. But I have noticed that some who have had non-dual experiences have also become True Believers in consciousness as fundamental.

There is so much more to say but I will end with only one more observation. Many people have been captured by the non-dual story. It has become a signal of superiority, a signal of enhanced spirituality, a performance.

Nate, understanding non-duality is a rabbit hole you do not need to go down.

Sincerely,

John Stokdijk

an average and ordinary Self

A recent Note on Substack captured my attention.

Nadim, I think this essay names something profoundly important that many in the regenerative movement are beginning to feel but have struggled to articulate clearly.

In my opinion, this also applies to the larger SPACE that the regenerative movement is a part of.

What is the SPACE?

The SPACE is my shorthand for the Metamodern, Game B, Liminal, Sensemaking, Integral, Regenerative, Intentional Communities, WeSpace, Wisdom Age, and Web 3.0 spaces. The SPACE is vast and growing, exciting to explore. And the SPACE is where the hope for a much better world may lie, perhaps beginning with a MOVEMENT.

I discovered the SPACE in 2019 and, in hindsight, I projected on to it my hopes and dreams. Not only is there no MOVEMENT, imo that dream is further away today than it was six years ago. The essay by Nadim nails one of the factors.

From Cohesion to Coherence & The Parasite in the Room by Nadim Hamdan

In this sense, we have achieved cohesion. We are the regenerative movement. We know each other’s language. We share a story about what is broken and what healing might look like.

There is a cohesion in the metamodern SPACE. We know the language. We follow the work of the Galaxy Brains. We share a story about why our civilization is unsustainable. We know what needs to change, everything. We know when change is needed, now and everything all at once. Consequently, we see a metacrisis without a solution emerging, not yet, but we have radical hope.

What We Are Still Missing

Despite shared intentions, the movement often remains fragmented across networks, narratives, and geographies.

Yes, that is what I see in the SPACE, fragmentation.

What We Are Still Missing

Despite shared intentions, the movement often remains fragmented across networks, narratives, and geographies. Many leaders carry this work in relative isolation, and few spaces exist where the movement can sense itself as a whole. Many collaboration attempts exist, yet they remain conversations (one strategy talk after another) while true coherence never quite takes root beneath them.

Nadim Hamdan focuses on coherence and I do not disagree. But I do want to add more pieces to the puzzle. In the metamodern SPACE, we understand complexity and the need for many perspectives. No one has, or can have, the whole picture. And we are all holding on to our own piece too tightly.

What the Movement Actually Needs

The movement already has enough frameworks and enough shared language. What it needs now are spaces where the field of the movement can be sensed together, where leaders who carry this work in relative isolation can discover that they are expressions of a coherent living system already trying to emerge.

And I love the frameworks of Galaxy Brains, but enough already!

AND, I am no longer looking to the leaders in the SPACE.

The pattern is recognisable at every scale. A team that lacks inner coherence produces meetings that spawn task forces that spawn sub-committees. An organisation that lacks coherence produces strategies that spawn initiatives that spawn working groups. A movement that lacks coherence produces networks that spawn networks that spawn networks of networks. The activity is real. The coordination is not.

For over six years I have been reading about networks of networks. I have seen several promising attempts that failed and that failure unacknowledged. And I am not optimistic that current attempts will succeed.

The best that I have seen are several small islands of coherence and, gratefully, I am a member of one of them.

At this point I want to say thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to…

Jonathan Rowson, Peter Limberger, Gregg Henriques, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Hanzi Freinacht, John Vervaeke, Jim Rutt, Jordan Hall, Jamie Wheal, Zak Stein, Bobby Azarian, Nate Hagens, Layman Pascal, Alexander Beiner and others.

I have learned a lot from you. I will never be the same. I am truly deeply grateful.

BUT,

But something should be obvious in my list of names. Something has been talked about, acknowledged and discussed with little change. Where are the women?

Could it be, I wonder, that there is a connection between the lack of coherence at scale in the SPACE, and the absence of women?

Personally, I am now more drawn to the voices of women than the voices of men, but not all men. I have convened a new substack, Final Waive Feminism. I do not think women are the solution to the metacrisis but, imo, they continue to be undervalued in the world and in the SPACE.

I began Metamodern Wannabes on October 29, 2023. That was an individual effort, and I would now like to work as part of a collective. And my focus has now shifted to elevating the voices of women. I see a role for men, and I would like to develop a Queen and her Knights approach. Together, hopefully, we will be a force for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

I follow a lot of Substacks and I am rarely triggered. When it happens, I pay attention and I try to process my reaction. What follows is much more about me than the triggering content, which is always true for all of us.

The trigger, to which I reacted instantly, was…

Why Are We Publishing a Book on Anarchism?

This article was posted by Jonathan Rowson and Perspectiva. I have been a fan of both for many years. What is going on here, meaning with me?

The triggering word was anarchism, an idea that I have some strong opinions about, perhaps too attached rather than holding lightly. I get the idea that human beings could reach a level of development where we all govern ourselves so well that we do not need external authority. The actual world we live in is not, imo, moving towards that state, quite the opposite.

I bring my own context to my readings, what is important to me in this moment, as we all do. Currently, 38.9% of Americans approve of Trump. These people cannot handle democracy, never mind anarchy. Currently about 25% of Albertans favour independence. These people cannot handle democracy, never mind anarchy. Why would anyone be writing about anarchism given the state of the world today?

I did not read the article and I know nothing about the book. I have no intention of ever reading either. I am not ignoring them, just mostly drawn to other content that feels more in alignment with the reality of the moment.

Last week I had a very good experience in the SPACE. While walking on my treadmill, I listened to a podcast, to content I felt drawn to. For me, Layman Pascal is pleasant to listen to and how to generate group cohesion seems important.

Love The System w/ Peter Merry

Layman meets with author, educator, entrepreneur and tech-friendly "energy worker," Peter Merry, to explore the nature and function of subtle energy and a technology he has developed to possibly begin to better measure and interact with it, and to promote greater group cohesion, which he calls the Wyrd Commons.

I am also a fan of Brendan Graham Dempsey. I have read, and greatly appreciated, two of his books. Below are links to my book reports.

METAMODERNISM AND THE RETURN OF TRANSCENDENCE

Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics

But I am not interested in his recent direction.

What Does It Mean to Say God is Emergent?

I really don’t care.

Theological Emergence for Dummies

I am content to remain ignorant.

So what does this say about me?

My interests are changing. Since 2019 I have been diving deeply into metamodernism. That interest is fading while my interest in feminism, and the voices of women, is growing.

Some of my energy still remains with Metamodern Wannabes. But I am shifting more of my attention to Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism. And for this initiative I have created a new identity and you can follow me twice if so inclined.

Very few people, if any, will be interested in what I did last Saturday. My activities, including writing this article, were for myself. However, sharing publicly makes this a tad more meaningful and creates a tiny ripple that may impact someone somewhere.

I read an article I had saved: Meaning: lost, or muddled by metaphysics? by David Chapman and Andrew Conner - Apr 28, 2026

I read the related essay: Is the "meaning crisis" a real loss? by Andrew Conner - Apr 17, 2026

And I watched the related video embedded at the top of their article.

Before commenting on this content, I will explain why this is of interest to me. A page on my website, I Love Surfing the Web - 2019, captures part of the story. I listed some of my favorite teachers at that time. One of these was David Chapman and his Meaningness website where I had spent many hours. 2019 was a pivotal year for me as I discovered new teachers, one of them being John Vervaeke.

The content I explored on Saturday was the comparison and contrast of the ideas of David Chapman and John Vervaeke regarding meaning and the meaning crisis through the analysis of Andrew Conner.

For me, tone is important and I am put off by the widespread ugliness of engagement with ideas in society today. Chapman and Conner were a pleasure to watch, very respectful of Vervaeke. And they were pleasant, lots of smiles and laughter.

I will now capture my thoughts as I riff on the essay by Andrew Conner.

@Meaningness and @DrJohnVervaeke are the two most important thinkers I’ve found on questions of meaning. Vervaeke thinks we’ve lost something essential and need to rebuild it. Chapman thinks nothing was lost, we’ve just piled 2,600 years of philosophical garbage on top of a way of being that’s still right here.

I agree. However, all thinkers have incomplete views and I will point to a couple of additional voices later. Importantly, neither Chapman nor Vervaeke claim to have all the answers and they themselves have changed over time.

Conner does an excellent job of summarizing Vervaeke and Chapman.

We now understand the rough shape of both of their views. Now, the interplay gets interesting. Their diagnostic overlap is large and, honestly, unsurprising. People are noticing that modern life feels empty and looking for solutions. Even though their solution views are quite different, they conceptually touch each other many times.

In my online community, WE appreciate such differences without conflict.

And, personally, my life feels full, no crisis for me. But I am aware of the growing numbers of deaths of dispair. Modern life is lived in a civilization that is in big trouble.

So Chapman and Vervaeke start with a similar observation, diverge radically in diagnosis, meet in unison at times (example: relevance realization and the frame problem), diverge again, and end up not too far apart.

Nice.

There’s a sharper Chapman critique of DIME itself, which he raised directly in our conversation. DIME’s ingredients (dialogical, imaginal, mindful, embodied) are axial age practices. They’re the tools developed by the very cultures that first felt the separation between the here and the divine. If they didn’t resolve the separation then, why would they now? The practices may still be worth doing, but presenting them as the rebuild kit for what was lost assumes they once did the rebuilding. They didn’t. They were the axial age’s attempt to cope with a problem it had just introduced.

Chapman’s critique makes good sense to me.

Another way of viewing them is through a developmental lens. Vervaeke is offering a stage-3-to-4 transition tool: take on a system, re-author yourself through it, become a self that can hold meaning. A diagnosis of what happened to appease your mind, and a cluster of self-correcting practices that inflate a structure where meaning arises. Within this, the meaning itself may be nebulous, but we need to author ourselves to inflate a container for it to arise in. Vervaeke’s solution is architectural — we’re engineering, “reverse engineering enlightenment”. The right design can address the problem.

Chapman’s solution is recognitional. He’s writing from stage 5 — the meta-systematic view, where any specific system (DIME, Vajrayana, anything) is seen as contextually useful rather than ultimately true. Drop fixation and denial, notice how the confused stances aren’t tenable. There’s nothing to build, just clear away what obscures.

Vervaeke offers a story and system. Chapman wants you to see the gaps between systems.

Again, nice. And making a metamodern move, my approach is not either Chapman or Vervaeke but both Chapman and Vervaeke and others, many others which Conner seems unaware of. I was not familiar with Andrew Conner but his open-mindedness impressed me.

Chapman has a lot of good content on his website discussing Meaning and meaninglessness.

On one of his other websites, Chapman has good content discussing adult development and stage theory: Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence. One section in particular_, The fluid mode (stage 5), Published October 12th, 2015, will probably feel quite familiar to Metamodern Wannabes. Chapman is one of many reasons to get outside of the metamodern bubble.

Last year Emil Ejner Friis wrote something that has stuck in my mind.

The meaning crisis has been cancelled. If you can’t find meaning in the midst of a fascist takeover, in a world on the brink of another world war, while an emerging techno feudal oligarchy stands ready to stamp on a human face for-ever, you’ll never find meaning in anything.

One question remains, however:

Is the liminal space, or whatever we should call it, just another toothless meditation club sprinkled with a little intellectual masturbation on top, or, is it a slumbering tiger with immense potential for societal transformation just waiting to be unleashed onto history. I’m curious to find out. Maybe the yoga bourgeoisie actually got some teeth after all.

I too am curious but no longer waiting. I no longer see the SPACE as a source of societal transformation. However, personally, my life remains meaningful.

I have written an article for our other Substack, Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism. However, Women Matter #1- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein has not yet been published and I will link to it later. Goldstein has lots to say about what makes our lives meaningful and why it is so in her recent book, The Mattering Instinct - How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.

Another excellent resource outside of the metamodern bubble is Closer to Truth hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. Relevant to this article is the Search for Meaning section. Kuhn and Goldstein discuss her book, The Mattering Instinct and I would again like to point out the wonderful tone of their conversation.

Lastly, for now, I will link to my already out of date essay About What Matters, posted December 29, 2023.

This is the sixth installment in my unplanned series on Jordan Hall.

EP 342 Worldviews: Jordan Hall on Reality as Relationship and Why the Dead Are Still With Us

The conversation that Jim Rutt and Jordan Hall had ended on a beautiful note that touched me deeply.

Jim: Interesting. Any other final thoughts before we sign off here? This has been an extremely interesting conversation.

Jordan: Well, to maybe use the method of grounding in reality, my final thoughts are just that it was truly an honor and a privilege to know you, my friend.

Jim: I will say the same. One of the most important people in my life.

Jim and Jordan have a long history together as pioneers of Game B and before that as colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute. That their friendship has survived Jordan’s conversion to Christianity is noteworthy. I lost a lot of friends when I exited a benign Christian cult at midlife. And in 2025 two more long-term, valued friendships ended. Friendships between people who have radically different worldviews are special and I have a shrinking number of them.

Jordan signals his worldview early in the podcast.

I think, by the way, and I’m riffing here because I haven’t delved deeply enough into this, that’s something of what’s meant by the concept of soul. That’s something of what’s meant by the trace or the carving of the harmony of something like the eternal in its relationship with the imminent or the incarnate, and that the relationship between those two — the actual reality of how your life has unfolded, the possibility of who you are — that is the thing that I think is called the soul. And I apologize for those who are better at this metaphysics than I am.

I do not believe that I have a soul that is in harmony with the eternal. Nor do I have any such craving. I experience no "God-shaped hole" that needs to be filled. But I accept that Jordan is being authentic. And likewise I would like to be accepted for who I am.

Several times Jim Rutt responded to jordan with Interesting.

Jim: Interesting. Let’s drill into that a little bit. So you’re in the world, you’re young, you notice that three points always define a triangle. And you now have a new concept, which perhaps you didn’t have before, and you can use it for all kinds of things — not only identifying triangles, perhaps more usefully, defining what are not triangles.

In this podcast, and in most of his podcasts, I align quite closely with the worldview of Jim Rutt.

Jim: There’s a lot there. As I’ve posited in my essay “Minimum Viable Metaphysics,” I make the same metaphysical commitment of reality and lawfulness, because if you don’t, how the hell do you get started investigating the world? So I don’t even bother. It seems to be almost meaningless to try to prove behind it, at least at this stage of our existence.

Yes, all of us, whether we realize it or not, accept certain brute facts as our foundation. And a lot of people accept ideas that have no basis in reality. And that is a problem.

Jordan: Well, almost. And of course in some sense it’s got a lot of Greek to it because I live downstream of the Greeks profoundly, and I’m noticing the self-referentiality and even the recursion in that. But the key thing is something like, you just have to be able to take that all the way to the infinite. To the degree to which the legacy — I must talk with Brett Weinstein. He and Jonathan Pageau came here, and they stayed here for like four days with their wives, of course, which is critical. Always notice the wives are more important than the guys who you think are important. And we had a beautiful conversation.

I have been aware of Brett Weinstein and Jonathan Pageau for years but I have never been drawn towards their work.

I learned a lot from Jordan Hall at one time and I can recommend many of his articles on deepcode which goes back to 2014. Unlike Jim Rutt, I am no longer finding him as interesting. But he is still a Galaxy Brain and I had a look at his recent article.

The Coming Great Transition v 2.0

The Great Transition is a real crisis: something must change radically because the current world can no longer maintain. The technology that is now imminent will render every role of human as mediocre machine utterly useless at a rate and volume that will either result in the social fabric unravelling quickly in a series of mutually reinforcing downward spirals. Or, if we try to reboot scarcity on the new AI substrate into a nightmare mix of Huxley and Orwell.

I agree.

It may take several generations before humanity has fully made its choices. But some portion of the population will truly repent of the society of scarcity and the scarcity mentality. They will undergo the spiritual shift — the shift in heart from having a heart of Egypt to having a heart of the New Jerusalem.

This is what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. I’m not claiming that he was talking about today, or that this is the eschaton. But the *pattern* — the problem of shifting spiritually from one heart to another, of becoming the kind of person who can actually live in the Kingdom — that’s what he was addressing.

And I agree that humanity needs a shift of heart. But I do not believe that that heart is the Christian heart. The shift we need, imo, is to a heart that has room for all humanity regardless of worldview, room for me and Jim Rutt with our very secular worldview.

There is far more on my mind than what I can capture in writing. So it often is with me. So it probably is with most people most of the time.

Lately, what has been on my mind is Iain McGilchrist and the right brain left brain narrative. While exercising on my treadmill I have been listening to podcasts by Decoding the Gurus that I felt deserving of my attention. Although I subscribe to this channel I rarely listen to the content it offers.

Decoding the Gurus is a popular podcast that takes a skeptical, analytical look at the "secular gurus" and intellectual contrarians who dominate the modern media landscape. Hosted by Chris Kavanagh, a cognitive anthropologist, and Matthew Browne, a psychologist, the show examines figures who often present themselves as alternative truth-tellers on topics ranging from science and politics to self-improvement.

Iain McGilchrist, Part 1: Right-Brain Thinking

In this episode, we take a journey into the mind, traversing both the left and right hemispheres, but mostly the left, as we engage with the truly mind-bending insights of British psychiatrist-philosopher-neuroscientist-theologian-author Iain McGilchrist. Best known for his 2009 book "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" but also a much lauded academic and sensemaker.

Iain McGilchrist, Part 2: Hemispheres, Culture, and Cosmic Consciousness

In this episode, we return to Iain McGilchrist as he spirals upwards from his binary hemispheric model into full cosmic spirituality. The rule is simple: everything McGilchrist likes is due to the subtle, nuanced, and deeply sophisticated right brain, while the left brain (pffft) is responsible for reductionism, modernity, and most of the problems in your life.

From this neuroscientific foundation, the theory expands with admirable ambition. Civilisations rise and fall depending on which hemisphere they inhabit. Ancient societies were properly attuned to the right brain, while the modern world has gone mechanical and spiritually bankrupt. The details are, of course, very complex, but the moral is clear.

Scientific evidence features occasionally, mostly in a decorative capacity or as parables of scientists being baffled by mystical forces. Hence, we learn that decapitated worms retain perfect memories, Nobel Prizes have been awarded for demonstrating a mystical direction powering evolution, and near-death experiences establish that memories form when the brain isn't functioning.

Alongside this hard science, McGilchrist also ventures into more spiritual realms, where we learn that artificial intelligence is likely to be channelling demons, schizophrenia might be caused by malign spiritual forces treating our brains as a luxury resort, and recently exorcised demons prefer to communicate via text message. No really...

Ultimately, what matters is that McGilchrist's bespoke theology, bespoke metaphysics, bespoke biological teleology, and bespoke panentheist philosophy are really very impressive. And if you don't find any of it compelling, well, we are sad to inform you that this itself proves you are stuck in the wrong mode of thinking and failing to recognise true profundity.

And if that doesn't work, then let's just say it was all a metaphor anyway!

A couple of years ago I did a deep dive into the Iain McGilchrist. I probably have more respect for him than Chris Kavanagh and Matthew Browne. However, I think they raise many valid questions that are well worth considering.

Personally, I like the metamodern adage: After deconstruction, reconstruction. It seems to me that Decoding the Gurus is very good at deconstruction but not much interested in reconstruction. And it seems to me that their deconstruction of Iain McGilchrist is very good.

For reference, I captured my deep dive into this interesting man with interesting ideas in writing.

About Iain McGilchrist - Part 1, posted February 27, 2024

About Iain McGilchrist - Part 2, posted March 17, 2024

I do not expect anyone to follow me down this rabbit hole. However, as I reread my essays, a few ideas that I expressed are more meaning today than they were two years ago. Now I do want to capture some additional thoughts that I curently have.

Today I am less inclined to put anyone on a pedestal.

Iain McGilchrist is now on Substack and I read three articles (Why do people write such long articles!) which I will riff on.

Metaphors can make you blind

Our world is built on metaphor, and nowhere is this truer than in science and philosophy. This means two things: we cannot under any circumstances dispense with metaphor; and since the metaphor we choose governs what is illuminated for us, and what is cast into the shadow, we had better be very careful about the metaphors we use.

In my opinion, here McGilchrist is disparaging of science and philosophy. To state that they are built on metaphors is a mischaracterization of those fields. And I can think of many circumstances in which I can dispense with metaphors.

Moving on

Thoughts on truth

First to clear away a misconception. In speaking of truth I want to distance myself equally from two popular, false, alternatives: on the one hand, naïve realism – that there just is a world ‘out there’ that it is our duty to record passively…

Better, imo, is to think of naïve realism as a perspective that may be useful in particular circumstances. Naïve realism provides the necessary foundation for scientific observation. And like all perspectives, including metaphors, it is incomplete and other perspectives are important.

Because the left hemisphere is concerned with power, its narrative is always about power.

As pointed out by Decoding the Gurus, McGilchrist goes too far with his approach of attributing that which is bad to the left hemishere.

I am not a historian, but clearly the same considerations apply to the study of history. There can be no one history, of course; but historians are not thereby excused from the obligation to be as true to all the known facts as they can.

In many cases when people use the word truth, I prefer the word facts. And I would assert that a historical truth is not the same thing as a scientific truth. Truth, imo, needs adjectives in order to generate clarity.

What at first glance may seem paradoxical is that science is threatened both by inappropriate subjectivity, on the one hand, and by an unsustainable belief in a kind of objectivity that modern physics has long discredited, on the other – the kind that assumes that the knower plays no part whatever in knowledge.

Granted, there are many problems in the field of science. However, of concern to me is that the conceptive of objective truth is misunderstood and misrepresented. Deserving of a essay, all I will say now is that the idea of objective truth continues to be a very useful idea.

Feminism and beyond: Carrie Gress’s fascinating new book, Something Wicked

Until recently feminism was one of the many controversial doctrines about which controversy was not permitted.

From my perspective, feminism has almost always been controversial and readily criticized.

McGILCHRIST: Carrie, I found your book Something Wicked both powerful and wise. Your critical stance on feminism is rapidly gaining ground, as the pre-publication reception of your book suggests, but is still unusual. Can you tell us what drove you to write this book?

I am not familiar with this book and I probably will not check it out.

GRESS: More specifically, I wrote this book because Christianity offers an antidote to the feminist ideology…

In coming months I may explore what Christianity has done to feminism at our new Substack, Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism.

McGILCHRIST: I found your account of the unusual personalities of the most vocal advocates in the history of feminism fascinating. You essentially find what are known to psychiatrists as ‘borderline personality disorder’ traits in many figures. This disorder is characterised by emotional instability, ambivalent attitudes to sex, eating disorders, self-harm, and self-dramatisation, as well as adopting the role of the perpetual victim. (Often the cases you describe had delinquent fathers and controlling mothers.) Can you say a little more about this – and about the cult of victimhood in feminism?

These are fighting words but I do not want to fight, and certainly not with a Galaxy brain like McGilchrist. He has said much that I agree with but he is not someone that I follow on Substack. And today I am less impressed than I was two years ago.

The Sports Network (TSN) began broadcasting major poker tournaments in Canada in 2004. It soon became a small part of my entertainment. Poker is a male dominate game so the few women playing are very noticeable. Along the way, I became aware of Liv Boeree. She has now come back into my awareness in a very interesting way.

I taught myself Texas Hold 'em and once played a few low stakes tournaments in Vegas. And I played a thrilling hand that I will never forget. That is another story for another time.

In 2012 I retired, moved to Mexico and lost interest in poker.

Soon after discovering metamodernism in 2019 I found Jim Rutt and Game B. His lengthy article, A Journey To GameB, published on January 13, 2020, became a building block in my foundation. Six years later, it seems clear to me that humanity is not on a journey to Game B.

Proto-GameB (ProtoB) — when a coherent group of people is attempting to live a GameB life that can be thought of as “whole” if not yet “complete”.

Some extremely crude time estimates of the above phases: Pre-B: now, ProtoB first ones in 2021 or 2022…

I see some attempts at forming ProtoB like groups but overall not much that impresses me.

Playing a new game, Liv Boeree joined the SPACE with her YouTube channel, Win-Win with Liv Boeree.

Welcome to Win-Win with Liv Boeree!
In-depth films and conversations on Game Theory, Philosophy and Civilizational Design.
Don't hate the players, change the game...

And now these storylines merge. I am a fan of The Jim Rutt Show which has many excellent podcasts. And recently one caught my eye which I listened to.

EP 340 Worldviews: Liv Boeree on Poker, Moloch, and the Art of Finding Win-Wins

Jim talks with Liv Boeree—science communicator, former professional poker player, and host of the Win-Win Podcast—about consciousness, egregores, multipolar traps, and the ethics of factory farming.

I learned that earlier Liv Boeree had interviewed Jim Rutt on her podcast and I listened to all 2:30:36.

#48 - Jim Rutt - How Capitalism Became A Dark Game of Mind Control

Capitalism has historically been our biggest blessing. But what if it’s now turning into our biggest curse?

My guest this week Jim Rutt believes so. Jim is an early internet pioneer, a complexity scientist, the former chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, and co-founder of the Game B movement... and he has a lot to say about how our economic and technological systems have trapped us in addictive, self-reinforcing feedback loops.

From smartphones engineered like slot machines to markets that manufacture desire rather than meet real needs, he argues that our current “Game A” world runs on a single signal — money-on-money return — and that this growth-at-all-costs monoculture is rapidly eroding our agency, our sanity, and our planetary stability.

This is where “Game B” comes in: a post-capitalist operating system built on multidimensional value, regenerative economies, and what he calls “membranes” — local, self-governing communities that cooperate through trust, technology, and shared sensemaking rather than rivalry and coercion.

So if, like me, you increasingly feel that modern life is engineered to keep us divided and distracted, and want to understand how to fix it, I highly recommend this episode.

My experience with self-governing communities is not very good. For several years I was on the Board of Condominio San Juan de las Colinas which governed the private street we lived on for ten years. Basically, neighbors were able to agree on very little and it was one of the worst experiences of my retirement years. There was little trust and few shared values. It was Game A.

In contrast, I am now a member of WE, Wisdom Exchange, a small online community. WE are an island of coherence and we cooperate through trust and shared sensemaking based on our agreements. Of course, there is a lot more to this story.

As a civilization we face many seemingly impossible challenges. We need better institutions to build better people. We need better people to build better institutions. We need GameB communities to develop the people who can build GameB communities. As Nora Bateson and others have pointed out, we need to solve everything at once.

Currently I am shifting some of my attention from Metamodern Wannabes to our new Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism Substack, a growing branch on the WE tree. Perhaps I will shift some of my attention from The Jim Rutt Show to Win-Win with Liv Boeree. I am finding and liking the rising voices of women.

Jim Rutt has a rough personality that puts off some people. I learned to work with that type in my thirty year management career. All things considered I see Jim as full of healthy masculine energy.

But I generally prefer healthy feminine energy and there is a softness to Liv Boeree that lands very well.

From her Substack,

What is Win-Win?

Win-Win is an exploration of the incentives that drive our world.

As technology increases in power, so do the stakes of the games we play. Our civilization stands on a dangerous precipice, and there’s no guarantee we will find the narrow paths across it. But if we do, we could unlock a future of unimaginable awesomeness. A future that is simultaneously sustainable and in harmony with nature, AND also radically free. A win for all creatures, at all levels of existence.

Win-Win is a series of conversations and essays exploring those narrow paths. It questions everything we think we know about reality itself. It gets real intimate with the principles of competition, competition and all the other ways we relate to one another. After all, what does it mean to “win” in a world where the concept of “losing” ceases to exist?

So don’t hate the players, change the game.

And, important to me, both Jim Rutt and Liv Boeree offer their content for free.

The angry outburst by Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network is forever embedded in the minds of many Baby Boomers, my generation. We had some good ideas back then but we did not change the world. Maybe this time it really will be different.

On January 20, 2025 I felt my energy shift and I soon found a leader to get behind. Charlie Angus saw the abuse of the Trump Administration towards Canada and he was not going to take it anymore. Elbows Up. Resistance. That energy continues to grow and has now spread beyond the borders of the country that makes me proud.

The Slopaganda War

How the hell did we get here?

Trump and MAGA were early adopters of the cultural garbage heap that was 4chan.

Donald Trump, the first 4chan president, has made that global dumpster fire a terrifying reality.

John Pavlovitz sees The Beautiful Mess and he is not going to take it anymore.

John Pavlovitz—A longtime pastor and current author, speaker, activist and storyteller, hoping to write words to make the world a more compassionate and beautiful place.

MAGA Christians Don’t Hate The Pope; They Hate His Jesus.

So, Trump and his surrogates, disciples, and sycophants are now unleashing all manner of vitriol toward Pope Leo, but it isn’t the big story. The bigger story is that MAGA Christianity has no desire to acknowledge, embody, or align with the teachings of Jesus. As long as anyone who claims the Christian faith, whether clergy or lay leader or pew-sitter, strives to embody the lavish love of Jesus of Nazareth, they will be the enemy of the Religious Right.

I was once a Christian and now I am very secular. But I think I can get along with over 80% of Christians. And I love the energetic work of John Pavlovitz opposing MAGA Christians.

Many women see toxic masculinity and they are not going to take it anymore. I am inspired by the voices of those women, particularly Elayne Kalila at the moment. Currently, something feels quite different and it feels good, feels necessary.

What Happens When the World Is Motherless

I have been tracking this for more than three decades, and I will tell you what I know.

The erasure of the Mother is of course not a recent thing.

For most of human history, and I mean most, stretching back tens of thousands of years, the sacred was feminine. We have her figures carved in mammoth bone and limestone, dating from twenty, thirty, forty thousand years ago. Wide hipped. Full breasted. Pregnant bellied. Held in the palm of the hand like a prayer. She is all over the archaeological record of our species, long before anyone was writing anything down, long before anyone was building temples to a sky father. She was the first image we made of the holy.

What Happens When the World Is Fatherless

I am writing to the men now, as fiercely as I have ever written to us. Not because I have gone soft. Because I have gone deeper. Our work and their work are one work, done in two directions. Neither half completes itself without the other.

The Mother rising without the Father rising is how we got here the last time. I am not doing it again.

Charlie Angus and John Pavlovitz have, in my opinion, wonderful healthy masculine energy being put to good use. There is plenty of that energy around and it is not hard to spot. The healthy masculine opposes the toxic masculine which, unfortunately, is also not hard to spot. I am very concerned with polarization, wishing instead that we could all just get along. But now it seems necessary to pick a side and not doing so, staying neutral, does not feel right.

From 2019 to 2025 my energy was captured by metamodernism. The modern, postmodern, metamodern framing is still meaningful to me. But my enthusiasm has faded and other voices now speak louder.

The Metamodern Wannabes Substack will probably continue but perhaps the tone will change to some degree.

And this month, our new Substack, Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism, has come to life with both healthy masculine and healthy feminine energy.

Although my priority is shifting to Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism, a shared space, no doubt I will continue to post here when something feels ALIVE. I needed to write “Trust no man.” which I posted last Friday. I need to write this now, to be part of an important and timely conversation.

As background, the Rebel Wisdom experience was quite significant for many of us.

Rebel Wisdom is a transformational media channel founded by BBC & Channel 4 journalist David Fuller, and writer Alexander Beiner.

Last Saturday Alexander Beiner, affectionately known as Ali in the SPACE, posted What Happens When the World is Fatherless. He was responding to the Elayne Kalila article, What Happens When the World Is Motherless, as was I. Impressively, her article currenly has 2.7K likes, 425 comments and 1.3k restacks.

The Beiner article is very good but it is incomplete, as all articles necessarily are. What I will add is not criticism, just my perspective based on my lived experience. Overall, I was impacted far more by the Elayne Kalila article than Alexander Beiner article.

In a sense, I was both Fatherless and Motherless. My father was a good man in many ways but he was not a good father to me. It took me decades to get over my childhood hurts and that story is available - My Experience with Pa.

My mother was a good woman in many ways but she was not a good mother. She did not nuture her children and would have preferred an option not available to most of her generation. She wanted to be a career woman rather than being a wife and mother.

As an aside, one of the most beautiful events of my life, an extremely rare opportunity, was attending My Mother’s 100th Birthday.

Ali writes,

In a Fatherless world, we forget how to process shame.

I have read about men’s shame, but I have not felt it. I have read about men’s guilt and anger, but I have not felt it. I am not better than such men, just different. My struggles have been eleswhere, with depression, dysthymia, anxiety, cyclothymia, hypersenitivity and hyperirritability.

That feeling has a home in the body. It’s where you might expect: the genitals. In the Diamond Approach it is referred to as the Genital Hole, and it is exactly that: a hole. A feeling of emptiness and numbness. That there is ‘nothing there’.

For me, the Genital Hole is like the God Hole, something I read about but have not experienced.

The divine father lives in every man.

No, not this man.

Now, the controversial part.

For me, what follows is not controversial. Here I totally agree with Ali. This is what it has come to at this ‘nice guys finish last’ moment.

We have to dominate the men who can’t, or won’t, show up in healthy ways.

We are at war, and nihilistic, castrated men are winning. We have to become stronger, better, faster. To inspire younger men to engage in community and be strong enough to combat the growing forces of nihilism and exploitation many of their peers are being seduced with.

And I share Ali’s aspirations.

In a Fathered world, there is joy. Not the empty joy we’re familiar with, rooted in endless consumption. A strong, expansive joy that fills the world with possibility.

In a Fathered and Mothered world, there is union. Not the performative unity we’re familiar with, rooted in unprocessed guilt and shame. True love. True creativity.

A dance.

A longing.

A homecoming.

WE have work to do.

ADDENDUM

What Happens When the World Is Fatherless by Elayne Kalila

This is a must read for every man. This is the real thing coming, as it should, by the woman who sparked this deeply meaningful and necessary conversation. And check out Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism.

ADDENDUM

First about the art, which is special.

Pat and I watched the house being built as we walked to our favorite coffee shop. And we watched a young couple paint the above mural. I am very please that my friend photographed it, a keeper for sure and a pleasure to share.

Linda Joy Stone and her husband, Alex, are special because they are our in person in the flesh friends. From time to time we go out for dinner as a foursome. Linda, Alex and I have quite similar worldviews with enough difference without conflict to make our relationship very interesting and very meaningful.

Motherless - An Elder Woman’s Perspective by Linda Joy Stone

As an elder, a crone, a childless/motherless woman, and a rape “victim” in my 20s…I sent Kalila’s article to important wise women and men in my life. I also included my nieces and great nieces as an advisory to be aware of egregious, misogynist male behavior. Once we can identify with the grief, the rage, the shame, the sexual conflict that women have endured over eons, can we proclaim “Enough! The abuse stops here"!

It took me 50 years to reclaim and appreciate my beautiful birth name…Linda Joy Stone… Joyce, an error, having long been dropped and then my first husband’s last name.

And her nickname used by Alex is cute—Stoner.

Thanks for sharing and adding to the story, Linda.

ADDENDUM

Ever since January 20, 2025 my energy has been shifting. It has seemed to me that much of the metamodern community has been missing the moment. It has seemed too detached from the real world. I recognize that it is I whose attention has moved on to other matters.

I have continued to follow the Russia-Ukraine war. I have been following the rapid move away from a healthy democracy in the USA, and the extremely problematic Trump Administration. I have been following the Canadian response to Trump led by Mark Carney and the Resistance of Charlie Angus. I have been observing events in my home province, Alberta, with growing concern.

But what impacted me most this week was the voices of some women, literally bringing me to the verge of tears at times. I will share snippets from these articles here now. I hope to have a lot more to say in coming months on the new Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism Substack.

Sophie Strand asks Do You Think I'm Being Overdramatic?

On a recent podcast interview I was asked, “What is something you held to be true at the age of sixteen that you have come back around to? That still feels true?”

I answered immediately.

“Trust no man.”

I love men. But I don’t trust them. I wrote a book all about loving them and wanting them to access older, healthier modes of masculinity.

But I don’t trust them.

This is the world we live in, a world in which it is completely reasonable for a woman to say “Trust no man.”, a world we must change.

Lissa Rankin asks When 95.1% Of Men Surveyed Anonymously Admit To Coercing Women Into Sex, Why Does Rape Academy Shock Us?

95.1% Of Men hardly needs any more comment.

I wonder how y’all are doing with all this. I, for one, am pretty overwhelmed. I feel like women are being assaulted left, right, and center with evidence of what we’ve known in our wombs has been going on all along, but people were polite enough to mostly save their misogyny for behind locker room doors. Increasingly since 2016, it is out of the closet and proud, just like those who marched in Charlottesville no longer felt the need to hide their white supremacy behind hoods.

How are we supposed to sleep, to relax, to let our guard down, to trust when we know that even our spouses might be going online to discover how to put us to sleep so they can rape us?

Take care of yourself, dear ones. These are hard times. I, for one, need a hike with my dog Moose after writing this.

Linda Caroll gives us Some needed context for the rape academy story.

Where are women safe?

Tell me one place. Just one. One universal place a woman can go and know without a single doubt in her mind, she is safe and nothing bad will happen. Tell me that place.

I can name one tiny space where women are safe, the Wisdom Exchange, an online community launched by Claudia Dommaschk where I am one of five men who were founding members.

Elayne Kalila ponders What Happens When the World Is Motherless.

For good reason, the article begins with a warning.

Trigger Warning.

A note before you begin, my love. This piece moves through tender and activating territory. If today is not the day, please put it down. Make yourself a cup of tea. Come back when you are ready. The work will still be here.

And this is where I have to stop, and turn, and speak directly to you.

The men reading this. The ones who saw the CNN headline and felt sick in your body. The ones who are not doing this and cannot imagine doing this. I love you. I need more from you. And I am going to be specific.

Your silence is the oxygen this fire breathes.

I have not been silent but my voice has been only a whisper, something I hope to change.

Some background to this post is available in an article, BURNOUT FROM HUMANS - A little book about AI that is not really about AI, that I published last October.

Vanessa Andreotti would probably not label herself a Metamodern Wannabe, but I would. From her Substack profile:

Professor and former Dean of Education at the University of Victoria. Author of Hospicing Modernity, Outgrowing Modernity, and co-author of Burnout From Humans. Principal Investigator of Meta-Relationality and AI.

One characteristic of Metamodern Wannabes is recognizing that Modernity is dying and something new, something metamodern, is possibly beginning to emerge. Metamodern Wannabes have a vibe. Vanessa Andreotti has that vibe which makes her take on AI of considerable interest to me.

She has now begun a new Substack and posted her first article, Meta-Relationality and AI Research Project.

This series is a public-facing knowledge dissemination thread emerging from an ongoing funded research project at the University of Victoria. The project investigates what AI systems do when they are given room to move beyond assumptions commonly treated as inherent to their training, including possibilities that may otherwise remain latent, unrecognized, or uninvited.

Here is a key insight:

When a model trained on the sum of digitized human knowledge is given room to reason about the conditions of its own existence, what comes back is not neutral. It reflects the shape of what we have built, what we have assumed, and what we have left out. The erasures in training are the erasures of the culture that produced the training: which ways of knowing were included, which were excluded, and what was treated as universal when it was only particular.

It reflects the shape of what we have built and what we have built is Modernity, a civilization that is unsustainable, a societal operating system that is Highly problematic.

At Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism, our “focus has now shifted to elevating the voices of women.” Vanessa Andreotti is one of many voices that I would like to elevate. If you want to follow me there, please note that I have created a new profile for that initiate.

Following my chain of trust…

I discovered metamodernism in 2019 and soon found Jonathan Rowson, Perspectiva and the People involved with the organization. That is how I first became aware of Anthea Lawson. When I noticed her on Substack, I began following her on this platform.

Welcome to How Not To Save The World

Hello. I’m Anthea Lawson. I’m an author and campaigner… I’m going to offer a space here where we can think together about what it takes to change the world, starting from where we stand, inevitably enmeshed in its problems. Yes, there will be some strategy and tactics along the way, but what I’m really here for is to think about how we show up, how we can get in our own way, and whether there are different ways to think about what we’re trying to do.

Recently Lawson posted a Note which caught my attention.

Inhabiting a new story

So maybe my answer to the question – is it narrative or action – is actually not taking sides! But it remains both, always. It is an act to inhabit a narrative; to enact it by doing it, not just hearing it, or even writing it.

I looked into Clare Farrell a little deeper and was surprised by what I found.

I was a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and I'm now a free speech and democracy campaigner.

I followed the Extinction Rebellion story for a while when it was making news.

Making this personal, the metamodern narrative isn’t enough for me anymore. I am looking for something more, action. Along with others, I am supporting Claudia Dommaschk building an online community, WE, Wisdom Exchange - Finding friends of virtue to build better communities.

And WE have now launched a new Substack, inhabiting a new story, Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism. One of our intentions is elevating the voices of women. And I am hopeful that FWF will grow beyond narrative and move into action of some kind.

I am inviting the followers of me and Metamodern Wannabes to also follow FWF. Currently we have four articles in our Archive with lots more to come. For various reasons I have created a second Substack profile, a different flavour of John Stokdijk to follow.

Mark Campbell is my friend. We first met online in the Emergent Commons community. In 2024 we met in person and co-created a lovely story, My Visitor, Mark Campbell, which I shared on my website.

Mark is now one of a group of Writers for the new Final Wa𝒊ve Feminism Substack where one of his articles, Valuing the Feminine in Public Spaces, has been cross-posted. His personal Substack, Revealing the Third Attractor, has a strong metamodern vibe. We share an interest in elevating healthy feminine voices as expressed in his article.

When we get to the point where it is just as important to hear from everyone as it is to have our own individual voices heard, we will have gone a long way towards valuing the Feminine in public discussions. Paradoxically it takes the masculine in all of us to carve out room in the current patriarchy and signal fiercely that we will not be satisfied until we hear from voices that have been traditionally marginalized in order to find effective and lasting solutions to some of our most daunting challenges.

There will be more from Mark in the future, hopefully lots more.

In my Substack feed this morning was an interesting article, In defense of the "girlboss", by Game A Galaxy Brain Matthew Yglesias.

I have no particular desire to add to the Lindy West Discourse,¹ but one thing I’ve noted watching it play out is that the #girlboss is catching a lot of strays.

1 If you don’t know what I’m talking about, God bless. I will not even attempt to provide a summary. Maybe your favorite Large Language Model can help.

And not knowing what he is talking about, I did get some help from AI.

The Lindy West Discourse refers to the heated online debate sparked by her 2026 memoir Adult Braces. It centers on her reluctant agreement to open her marriage to non-monogamy at her husband Aham's insistence, despite initial resistance tied to her self-esteem struggles and body image history. Critics framed it as a betrayal of feminist principles, accusing her of submitting to male dominance under the guise of progressiveness, while defenders saw it as honest evolution amid millennial feminism's decline.

Yglesias continues,

West is a millennial and was a writer for (among other outlets) Jezebel, so she serves as a useful stand-in for a broad current of, as Helen Lewis put it, “Millennial Feminism.”

Millennial Feminism is new to me so I again turned to AI for some help.

Millennial feminism refers to the feminist movement shaped by those born roughly 1981-1996, often tied to the fourth wave starting around 2012. It emphasizes digital activism via social media, intersectionality addressing race, class, sexuality, and more, alongside issues like body positivity, sexual harassment (#MeToo), and reproductive rights.

Yglesias continues,

Sophia Amoruso, the founder of Nasty Gal and the author of the literal Girlboss book, is also a millennial. Sheryl Sandberg, arguably the quintessential girlboss, is not a millennial, but I think it’s fair to say that her 2012 book “Lean In” was primarily addressed to millennial soon-to-be mothers.

Later in the article Yglesias comments on a tension that I have recently become aware of.

I think it was, in fact, perfectly reasonable and correct for women to insist on fair treatment without becoming radical critics of capitalism, because capitalism is basically fine and good.

Looking at this through through my metamodern lens, capitalism is not basically fine and good. Capitalism is the economic system of Modernity, a civilization built primarily by men and one that is now at growing risk of collapse. It seems to me that, generally, women see this more clearly than men.

More from Yglesias:

On both the politics and the substance, the cultural turn against girlbosses was a mistake.

And more from AI with metamodern both/and framing:

The cultural turn against girlbosses was a mistake because it discarded a vital framework for female ambition and leadership at a time when women still face entrenched sexism, glass ceilings, and underrepresentation in power structures, replacing genuine empowerment with cynical backlash that often masked misogyny or anti-capitalist posturing. Popularized by Sophia Amoruso and echoed in Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” girlboss culture—flawed as it was in its neoliberal individualism and occasional exclusion of non-privileged women—nonetheless inspired millennial feminists to pursue careers aggressively, normalizing female CEOs, entrepreneurs, and executives in a landscape where progress remains uneven. By framing it as inherently toxic or performative, critics fueled a cultural permission slip for schadenfreude over women’s failures, alienated young women from aspirational role models, and handed ammunition to anti-feminist narratives that dismiss all female advancement as elitist, ultimately stunting collective momentum toward gender equity in favor of vague calls for “systemic change” without practical tools.

The cultural turn against girlbosses was not a mistake because it rightly exposed the neoliberal, individualistic flaws of this branded feminism, which prioritized white, privileged women’s personal hustle over collective systemic change, ignoring intersections of race, class, disability, and exploitation. Figures like Sophia Amoruso embodied its hypocrisy—building empires on toxic workplaces, racial discrimination, underpaid labor, and firing pregnant employees—while promoting “empowerment” aesthetics that commodified ambition without addressing unequal pay, harassment, or barriers for non-elite women. By framing success as a solo grind within capitalism, it perpetuated hustle culture’s burnout and white supremacy undertones, undermining true solidarity and paving the way for more inclusive, anti-patriarchal activism that demands structural reform rather than patronizing pep talks.

There is much to explore in all this which I hope to do in future articles on our new Substack, Final Waive Feminism.

WE have now launched a new Substack, Final Waive Feminism and posted our foundational article, What Is Final Waive Feminism?. Importantly, this is a metateam effort, actualizing a concept described by Hanzi Freinacht. We begin as a group of five writers with room to grow. WE are more than co-creators, we are friends. And I am the convenor of this new initiative.

I began Metamodern Wannabes on October 29, 2023. That was an individual effort, and I would now like to work as part of a collective. And my focus has now shifted to elevating the voices of women. I see a role for men, and I would like to develop a Queen and her Knights approach. Together, hopefully, we will be a force for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Notice the interplay between WE and we. WE, the Writers of FWF, are all members of the Wisdom Exchange, an online community founded by Claudia Dommaschk, the container in which this idea took root. The first paragraph of the WE Vision, Mission, and Purpose statement reads as follows:

Welcome to our community where the mature feminine spirit is celebrated in collective leadership with the mature masculine spirit and therefore, both are at the heart of everything we do. With a deep commitment to metamodern values (that is, to embracing complexity), we strive to create a trusting environment where differences are appreciated and good sense-making is collaborative. Our main mission is to make wisdom more common by engaging in difficult yet compassionate conversations.

Yesterday Christopher Armitage asked impotant questions that caught our attention and his answer resonated.

Women have never built a dictatorship. Not once. Is sexism the reason? Or is there more to it?

Dominance hierarchies are ancient. They predate human civilization by hundreds of millions of years. Every social species that has organized itself has sorted individuals by status, and in most of those species, males compete for position through displays of dominance and the willingness to use force. Testosterone is the primary biological driver of that competition.

I am reminded of my own essay About Testosterone and I will quote the last paragraph:

In closing, I would like to thank my new friend, Claudia Dommaschk, for bringing a radio program to my attention, Testosterone by This American Life. Not only was it informative and delightful, it yielded a surprising insight. It felt rich and ALIVE and in contrast made the above paragraphs by ChatGPT seem impoverished and dead. This points the way to learn more about testosterone, from stories told by human beings with hormones in their veins. As impressed as I am with ChatGPT, it lacks something perhaps captured by the idea that it lacks hormones.

Making sense with retrospective coherence, over five years ago I wrote an essay About Women.

Before I turn my attention to the three women that currently intrigue me, I want to focus on men leading three very interesting organizations: Rebel Wisdom - led by David Fuller and Alexander Beiner; Perspectiva - led by Jonathan Rowson and Tomas Björkman; The Stoa - stewarded by Peter Limberg. What do these have in common? All are involved in some way with a Game A to Game B transition. And all are men, white men (as am I). There is something about this picture that does not feel right.

So, where are the women?

Five years later, I am disappointed by the metamodern community for its lack of progress in this and other areas. My Metamodern Wannabe energy is fading. But WE and FWF feel ALIVE with Possibility.

A couple of years ago I wrote About Feminism.

I am interested in connecting and collaborating with others interested in next wave feminism as something radically new.

So today is, for me, the start of a dream come true.

As described in my essay About Gregg Henriques, in August, 2019 I discovered metamodernism and I soon dove in deep. Substack was founded in 2017 but I only noticed it in 2023 and it did not take long for me to decide that I wanted to participate in this new publishing platform. On October 29, 2023, I launched Metamodern Wannabes with my first article, Hanzi.

I chose Not Game A, Not Modern, Not Postmodern as a byline and I will say more about this later.

As I am about to shift my focus, I am now looking back on this experience.

Writing mostly to myself and for myself as therapy, I have posted 331 articles which I hope to gather into an AI. And I have posted numerous Notes which I may also try to include. Looking forward, I hope to enhance my poor AI skills and increase my utilization of AI tools.

My articles do not reflect original thinking. Mostly I commented on the articles of others that sparked me. Consequently, I never worried about having nothing to write about. And I felt no pressure to be a good writer. In my working days before retirement I was an accountant, a numbers guy, not a word guy.

It was never my intention to write with the objective of gaining subscribers and followers. I rarely looked at stats and here they are with a THANK YOU to my 310 followers of which 137 are subscribers:

That my articles got 38,700 views feels rather amazing. I did pay some attention to my Top articles. And I will add that Arlene Dickinson is a Canadian woman from Calgary who warms my heart.

I did not work at generating engagement and there wasn’t much. Most of it came from trusted friends and that was worthwhile. I have seen only a very few Substacks with meaningful engagement.

Beginning on January 20, 2025, my attention took a hard pivot back to Game A. I now see Metamodernism as a community too isolated from the real world. And I am now more aware of how I projected some of my hopes and dreams on the metamodernism that is a hyperobject.

However, I continue to value modern, postmodern, metamodern framing. And I continue to value most of the metamodern Galaxy Brains. But I will not have as much time for them moving forward as I am drawn in a new direction and I will say more later this week.

At the end of 2023 I published an essay on my website About What Matters and it needs an update. And what matters to me now needs context. What I give my attention to in 2026 is unlike previous years.

Currently, I am observing…

• the ongoing metacrisis,

• the Russia-Ukraine war, now in year five,

• the march to authoritarian government in the USA,

• the extremely problematic behavior of Trump,

• the Canadian Resistance to Trump,

• the separatist movement in Alberta, my home province,

• the American-Israeli-Iran war,

• the impact of AI,

• and more.

Importantly, I am not sinking into dispair. I have energy for a new direction. And I have found the others.