Reflections

Looking back, Looking forward

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.