THIS WEEK!!!
OVERWHELMING!!!
I am sensing that March, 2026 may be somewhat similar to March, 2020.
I wrote,
I cannot predict what April will bring other than that conditions will get worse almost everywhere.
Inside the Brain of a Dictator: Why Trump Will Ultimately Use the Nuclear Codes
Dictators are portrayed as sadists, but this is not the whole story: for them both destruction and self-destruction serve the same psychological reward, to the point where they truly do not distinguish between the two. This is why autocracies tend to make no sense: they embody the extreme, unhinged, explosive elements of the tyrant in charge. Trump is so desperate for attention that, the nuclear codes are the rosary he clutches on to. If all else fails, he can always use the nuclear option and catapult himself straight to the top of the hall of fame.
I do not share the certainty of George Tsakraklides, but Trump using nuclear bombs is within the space of reasonable possibility.
I am following the war in the Middle East mostly through the Substack activity of Shanaka Anslem Perera. However, the volume of information from him is OVERWHELMING!!! Trump was manipulated into starting a war that he does not understand and cannot stop. We are in a time that is extremely dangerous and extremely uncertain. March 2026 may prove to be at least as significant as March 2020.
I try to keep up with Charlie Angus and I thought his analysis in an article this week was very insightful.
The Fall of Roe v. Wade: A Cautionary Tale
At a time when American women were struggling to pay bills and cover the health costs of their children, Neeleman and the tradwife phenomenon built an alternate universe of comfortable domesticity, vintage housewife fashion and happy white children.
The trad wives drew a fair bit of skepticism, ridicule, and eye rolling. Few took the tradwife movement seriously.
I only followed the tradwife phenomenon from a distance.
I became collapse aware and collapse accepting in 2019 and I know that some people sensed this possibility long before I did.
I’ve Been Preparing for Our World to Collapse for 20 Years — This Is What I Learnt.
For a long time, the world kept going. Life continued and I kept being called a doomer, a crank. I felt like Chicken Little wandering the streets with a placard reading The End Is Nigh.
The doubts were real. There were moments I wondered whether I had upended my life, my family ties and my retirement for nothing.
But I kept going — not out of stubbornness, but out of a deeper conviction that even if the timing was uncertain, the direction was not.
And Susan Harley and I share something that is very difficult to explain to anyone who does not feel what we feel.
Here is what nobody tells you about living as though your world might end: it makes ordinary life extraordinarily vivid and beautiful.
I live with the possibility of a nuclear WWIII. I am not in despair. I feel more ALIVE than at any other time in my life.
I follow Thom Hartmann and The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human on Substack, but only a little bit, so litte time…
Does Slowing Down Feel Like Failure? A Taboo?
Many people discover, only after they slow down, that much of what they were rushing toward wasn’t actually what they wanted. The space created by slowness allows for that sort of recalibration.
Getting personal and feeling the urgency of our time and my stage in life, I am in a hurry. I want to get stuff done now. My trusted friends are telling me to slow down. They may be right. And WE are having a public discussion about this: 4 comments.
What I would like to do, and what WE are working on, is launching a new Substack. And I am holding the tension. Indy Johar nicely captures my experience in a recent article.
On the Difficulty of Discernment in Building
It is the constant question of when to listen, when to make myself vulnerable enough to really hear what is being said, and when to be wise enough not to listen at all.
This tension is not about arrogance (although it can look like that). It is not about believing one knows better than others. It is about trying to find a pathway forward while holding the responsibility of bringing something into the world that does not yet fully exist.
Staying with the personal, I like to read and Pat prefers videos. Yesterday morning we watched two powerful ones together. They capture a growing mood.
Importantly, we also talked about coregulating our emotions as we watch videos like this.
Yesterday afternoon I attended the Club of Hanzi with Robert Kelley: The Seven Frequencies of Transformation. (My first post on this Substack was about Hanzi.) The Zoom session was a mostly good experience for several reasons.
I can now say more about lauching a new Substack. I had a growing sense that Metamodern Wannabes was not effective branding, although capturing attention was never my intention. At the Club of Hanzi I learned that Robert Kelly and Emil Ejner Friis plan to rebrand metamodernism. They would like to spread metamodern ideas beyond the intellectual metamodern bubble. They would like to add Power to Wonder and help get things done. Likewise, our new Substack will enable us to have some impact outside of the metamodern community with better branding, and much more.
As a prelude to what is coming, below are two slides from the Club of Hanzi.
Lastly, Wendy Lawrence had something to say to my generation: The Boomer Generation Had Every Advantage and Still Burned It Down. This article is, to say the least, very incomplete. Better than intergenerational criticism and conflict would be exchanging intergenerational wisdom which WE try to do.
The Boomer generation ran the most powerful country on earth into institutional rot and decay. Political corruption became routine business practice. A major political party aligned itself with a foreign adversary’s preferred candidate. Leaders and commentators still called the result freedom.
The voters now inheriting that wreckage came of age studying every decision that produced the damage. That generation carries a clear record of which leaders made those choices and why those choices endured. The reckoning now arrives at the ballot box organized, funded, and uninterested in rehabilitation.
All I will say is that Millennials and Generation Z are not our Saviors and they are merely inventing new ways to fail.
This week is overwhelming and we are only at Thursday.
And Pat and I are now going for a long walk followed by a late breakfast at one of our favorite places.