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.




Thank you for your contributions here. You helped me orient myself in sea of information on Substack. Looking forward to what is coming next! 🤗