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When you live with a limitation for so long, it’s hard to imagine life without it.
“These walls are funny—first you hate em, then you get used to em,” Red says in Shawshank Redemption, a movie about prisoners.
“Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized.”
His friend says: “Shit, I could never get like that.”
But Red replies that you can get like that, almost unknowingly, and we see evidence of this all the way up to the finish line of our Final Exam.
Whipped up into a frenzy, people accept the shackles of media worship more quickly than ever it seems. Twitter avatars were changed overnight to accommodate the yellow and blue streaks of the Ukrainian flag.
Perhaps that flag emoji sits next to a vaccine emoji—or was simply traded out. No matter.
The dependency on a Mother System—both nurturing and scolding—is alive and well in our modern society. Many line up for the milk of meaning, rationed out one drop at a time.
Others of us, though, have brainstormed our own supply chains of meaning over the past six months.
Six months. It’s incredible to even think that we’ve been in this pressurized test for so long.
By the time we reach the Virgo Full Moon on March 18, little of these current walls will remain. You might see their rubble in your rearview mirror, before turning your sights back to new horizons.
This March 2 Pisces New Moon marks the final threads of the Final Exam. It teaches us strange truths about the meaning of endings.
I doubt that even by March 7 there will be much stability left in old structures. Mars and Venus enter zero degrees Aquarius, and snap, just like that, a switch is flipped. A radical future is coming at us fast.
I almost imagine the days leading up to the March 18 Full Moon will be like the eerie calm after a giant explosion. This yearly Virgo Full Moon is typically chill, too, regardless of what’s around it.
Yes, our Final Exam surely didn’t end in a whimper. All the slouching dogs of the Old World joined a knock-down fight for your attention. Putin wanted your attention. So did the CDC. So did HBO.
But why any citizen would think they have, um, a dog in that fight is beyond me. I suppose you can say these people are… “institutionalized.”
I have no interest in the latest episode of Euphoria. Or using numerology to predict a major Dow crash or World War 3. Nor am I obsessed with the latest slur dropped by a celebrity.
These prisons may offer some provisional comfort, some modicum of meaning. But as the bell rings on this Final Exam, and the results pour in quickly, evidence of widespread decay will be undeniable.
Who can look at the edifice of Western power, or the 24/7 infotainment complex, and not see fissures sprawling from end to end?
Talk to any grocery store clerk, mailman, plumber, entrepreneur, mom or college student: they all know something is deeply wrong with society. It is confusing, it lacks a richness of sense and meaning.
And yet many will voluntarily hug the walls that are crumbling right now.
This will lead inevitably to fracturing, splintering, asymmetrical distribution of meaning.
These are all the hallmarks of the Patchwork Age.
As people subsist on different grades and amounts of truth, everybody will begin to realize that meaning is the most precious commodity in the 2020s.
No one can fake it, no matter how hard they try. If their truth is shit, the fruits of their labor, the vibe of their tribe will reflect it. They will indeed be in search of…euphoria.
And that brings conflict when an adjacent tribe seems to have more meaning than you.
We all need truth. Those running on low-grade versions of it are already rundown.
It’s a warzone out there, and those of us who are curious, empathic, creative types may find ourselves on the Borderlands: between a broken Old World and the greener pastures of Tomorrowland. How can we manage that?
The End Has No End
And what a Tomorrow it will be. I make no judgment on those who blast away from the ruins of the Old, onto horizons we can barely comprehend now.
These people will be the new pioneers. I expect as early as this year we will begin to see some major fruits of their labor. Next year even more so, perhaps.
But I suspect there are many here who are like me. Personally, this ending brings a huge sense of nostalgia. I’m sitting on the hill, overlooking a place that used to be home.
I somewhat liked the Old World. The synchronization of meaning. The collective sense that we were sharing something in a national sports game or sitcom.
Some of that remains, but it has to be consciously curated. The Old World has died according to its own hubris and greed. It got infiltrated, corrupted by self-serving parasites.
You can’t really argue that today’s sitcoms are anything like the character dramadies of water cooler shows like Friends.
No, they’re injections straight to the brain, fully intended to give the passive viewer a confirmation of their unquestioned truths.
In certain cases, some of us may have friends, family members or lovers who are plugged into these ruins. An idealism as great as the pioneers seems to fill us up. Just as some are destined to be on the future’s bleeding edge, others understand there is much healing to be done in the past.
This Pisces New Moon teaches us that the end of our collective Final Exam has no shared ceremonial end. The conclusion just echoes backwards into infinity, bouncing off pieces of shattered collective meaning—an old clip of David Letterman, a faded McDonald’s sign, a red MAGA hat on the shelf.
It’s not as easy as saying, “Just leave these people and places behind.” All these old and new timelines will co-exist in our patchwork world. We won’t just have utopian crypto-fueled farmsteads.
All new visions unfurled under the Sun will wave their colors precisely because winds from the past are beating at them.
Thus, many of us will probably be raising our flags on the Borderlands: the frontier line of the New World, but also in proximity to the Old.
There will be a deep process of emotional recovery that people go through for years as they settle into their losses and/or care for those who remain dependent on increasingly dysfunctional supply chains of meaning.
A big reason for this is because 100% utopia is easy only in the mind.
Lots of people imagine that capable, rational people will be called up at whim when it’s time to do the hard work. Wait until they learn that even keeping a clean kitchen is hard enough at the smallest of communes.
I use a material metaphor here, but I’m referring mostly to how all relationships thrive on a shared or at least tradeable sense of meaning.
Due to the asymmetric distribution of intellectual and creative resources in our Very Online epoch, it may will be harder than ever to be on the same page with people around you.
Jaggedness of meaning will be a defining condition of 2022, I believe.
Already there is little seamlessness between the online experience and one’s experience of Western cities, for the most part. Instead, it’s highly frictional. About the only consensus you can find is, “Well, shit ain’t working like it used to.”
As I say in my Patchwork Manifesto: “The macro narrative will be known by its absence.”
Even your neighbor, or the person who rings up your groceries, could be chained to that Old World.
And what then? Will you not speak to them? Treat them as sub-human, in a patronizing tone?
Post-Final Exam, we’re all going to have to find strategies for navigating this fractured world. Conscious curation of our own visions can quickly turn into a cult-like experience if we try to ignore the past out of existence, where many people around us remain caught.
So we must tend to the past, if we feel called to do so.
For me, that’s the real frontier: learning how to treat my own past with compassion, to give it a place in my heart, while also mapping where I’d like to see things go. This will soften the effort made relating to people stuck in the Old World.
Doubtless, too, some of you will simply be the pioneers on the bleeding edge. I’ll be watching what you do, observing what you discover.
It’s been a wild ride this past six months. And I couldn’t ask for a better group to share it with.
Raise your glass: here’s to new beginnings—and to accepting that the end has no end.
Would you like access to this level of guidance, backed up by the time-honored system of astrology?
I will help you find a unique purpose in this world of change.
Apply for a birth chart reading HERE
I see your ‘Room on Fire’ era Strokes reference, Paul. And I like it.
Funny how The Strokes themselves have been labelled as ‘Indie Sleaze’ and a recontextualised and (further) commoditised version of this aesthetic is being peddled to the Zoomers.
Now is this a sign of the last gasps, the death spasms of the old world, or is it simply me who is getting old and has now witnessed the Twenty Year Rule of pop culture play out from both ends?
Who can say? But it’s fun to contemplate such things anyway.
And also for better or worse I feel like I turned my Final Exam paper in early and am now looking at my watch waiting for the results to be posted up on the notice board.
Great work here as always, Paul.
Cheers.
Brilliant Paul, loads in this resonated. Have been quite astonished at the lining up of macro happenings and personal goings-on or progression over the last couple of years, your posts are quite enlightening in this regard. Have definitely felt a shift to 'spring' in the past week, possibly down to the weather where I am making the leap, though maybe it's all in the stars
It's always interesting - and energising - when your instinctive self catches up with where your rational mind is trying to will it to go. Frustrating while it's doing the work or patiently waiting for time to 'get there', makes complete sense when it happens.