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We are in a time of major endings. Long storylines are coming full circle. Across our society, this creates a deep sense of longing, pining, loss, grief and nostalgia.
A world is slipping away from our grip and we don’t know if we can get it back.
On TikTok we see middle aged people playing with a feature that shows not only a simulated version of themselves as a teenager but also their reaction to this mirage.
A split screen reality.
In some ways, this trend highlights the compassionate charity that skirts around the edges of late winter.
We feel inspired, moved to tears, watching others weep over What Once Was.
But is it an accurate reflection?
Something here feels sinister, contorted. It would perhaps be different if this little game used an actual photo from someone’s youth. But what we have is an approximation of those golden wonder years.
It’s messy, full of guesswork, and reminiscent of the vanity apps that are now standardizing beauty.
So the pining isn’t really over What Once Was. The pining is for whatever the oracle dictates the past was. Likewise, we are getting excited about a version of beauty that is transmitted to us from a lifeless filter.
In this series, I’ve attempted to lay out the transition we’re all in—the transition to People™.
One of the central concerns of the rest of the 2020s will be humanity. What is a person? Can we just deep fake pixels on a screen and call that a person? If enough of the collective agrees yes to that, does it make the process true and beautiful? Or does it highlight how far we’re falling into a new prison of our own making, one that appears to be full of “freedom”?
I think we can try to make some attempts at answering this question, through the topic of endings, which will be on our minds in early-mid March.
Clearly, what has made this TikTok trend so sticky is that it gives society a way to express emotions towards endings. The loss of innocence and youthful beauty. However, the catharsis hardly works well when the ending is something a machine gives you, rather than an ending that you’ve authored for yourself.
I think the main struggle in March will be how we as a society lack a collective ending. Once upon a time, we had 9/11. The covid lockdown was perhaps the last big moment of “togetherness”—and ironically, the meaning of that last moment was to prophesy the coming fragmentation.
It’s tough. We must accept that there will be no Big Tent ending to the suffering we’ve gone through over the past several years.
No big neon sign that drops from the clouds and redeems everything with: “It all happened because of this…”
There will be no collective “all clear!” from Biden regarding covid. There will be no collective “case closed!” regarding the financial bailouts from 2008.
Instead, each of us individually will have to author an ending and script a goodbye ceremony for what has been a deeply challenging cycle.
And so there will be no storybook ending in March. Instead, there will be storybook ENDINGS—plural.
As each of us raises a funeral candle to the passing of civil society—the Big Tent where all of us could agree to disagree—it will create a prototype of a patchwork society.
This is a ritualized moment of how we can lead creative lives in the next half of the 2020s.
We will discover that we have the tools to express our personalities in ways that break the mold and don’t fall prey to the attention economy and engagement metrics. We can transcend the snapshots that live exclusively on a screen and find bridges to the vital spark that lives offline.
It doesn’t mean you can’t post online. In fact, I’d encourage you to get more eyes and ears on your art. But do so in a way that is congruent with the act of creation, rather than creating a persona that divides you from others and yourself.
Of course, this is all easier said than done. One of the central themes of this series has been how tribalism will easily hijack this new personal freedom sitting at our feet. The vanity of difference makes our expressions online seem as if it’s bringing us closer to others, when really it’s about creating fantasy territories that by nature exclude others who are deemed unenlightened, unhealthy or unsuccessful.
Many will outsource their mourning to a frustrated tribe, who will play the funeral dirge on the church organ with resentful emphasis:
“It was Big Pharma that stole those years! It was Big Agriculture that raped our innocence! It was the political psyop that turned us into slaves! If you take this, consume this, do this…then you’re on the side of evil. So come on, give up defining yourself by who you are at core. Define yourself by what you do and don’t do. Define yourself by how you plan to redeem this ruined world with us.”
Look, I’m not saying that these critics don’t have some good points. We have been deceived in many ways. But I am saying that they are not getting the catharsis they need through the avenue of religious, evangelical fervor.
Instead, they are assembling their disciples to stay stubbornly fighting for a territory that frankly no longer exists.
These tribes want to fight for the Big Tent, to claw back the territory where we all share the same discourse, so they can prove at the end of the day, like a miraculous TikTok app, that it was raw milk or virginity or teetotaling or local produce…
Some PURE thing, like a pristine mountain cabin, was all along the miracle pill to their long cycle of suffering.
In other words, these tribes, like the weeping TikTokers, are conjuring a ghost of the past that will be their savior avatar as they march into the future.
Instead of letting the past end, so it can be therefore honored in a fresh future, they pause picking over data that will prove them right in the storybooks of history.
The train to the future is preparing to depart and they’re making a fuss in the boarding line over whether the dinner car will have Fair Trade coffee, as if that will control how the ride goes down.
Just get on the damn train!
Let’s keep going.
The Charity of the Moment
There are many good things happening now. We can call this an ending or we could just as well call it the preparation for a spring thaw.
Invisible to the naked eye, the trees are coming alive. A process is underway.
Exciting!
But again, there is a lot of deception, a lot of self-gaslighting at play now in the collective as well.
Everybody is looking for some kind of stability and security that won’t bounce like a train on rails to Tomorrowland.
Hint: that doesn’t exist right now. So you can get on and figure it out with the rest of us…or watch from the sidelines and tell everyone they’re doing it wrong because they had a glass of whiskey, or wore pants with polyester on Tuesday, or asked a stranger in the grocery store on a date.
As society gets crowded at the usual exits, creating a bottleneck, people may start to believe—and charismatically persuade others—that we’re all about to make some triumphal escape into the Promised Land.
“Just do this, follow these rules, or follow these esoteric anti-rules, and you’ll be fine!"
If this sounds like a cult drinking poison kool-aid and then going for a “nap” until the extraterrestrials come down to save them…well, that’s because group dynamics right now are mirroring that cultish impulse.
“Soon…the esoteric kingdom will be restored!”
Well, maybe. Probably just in various localities, in partial ways. But not in a broad based, full spectrum way that causes all to rise up in one big circle, holding hands, saying, “The rapture has come!”
So keep your eyes out for prophets of Revelation, because many would just love to twist this moment into a sales pitch moment for their miraculous exit from our cultural wasteland.
The exit is coming of its own accord. It’s right here, in the creative tools at your disposal. Everybody knows the Old Ways don’t work anymore. You don’t need to be a Hubermensch to understand that.
All you have to do is craft how you’re going to ride through that tunnel on the train. Are you going to hold your breath? Or maybe get pumped up and do some barbell squats as we wheel into a crazy future? Maybe you’ll have some tea and quietly watch it through your window as you journal.
Maybe you work up the courage to say hi to that person over at the bar who seems cool. Maybe you make up your mind to quit a job you hate. Maybe you call your sibling and just say, “Hey, I’ve never told you, I love having you as a brother, I love having you as a sister.”
The charity of the moment has given you an exit and an ending. No kool-aid required.
But what’s on the other end of this dark tunnel? If we listen to our heart and do whatever we want in this transition, does that mean we’ll at least see something good on the other side?
No Guarantees Behind Door #3
Another pitfall of our present window is Either/Or thinking.
“Well, if I say no to the Raw Milk Exit Plan…that must mean I’m saying yes to the Laptop Nomad Exit Plan.”
You see, our mind gets confused about making a leap of faith, and instead gets caught at the precipice.
It starts mapping out our options from what it sees in the landscape. It starts taking inventory, mapping out every available product on the shelves.
Have you been at the grocery store lately? They have 50 different versions of everything.
It’s a lot like endings now. Social media, and our cultural wasteland in general, has 50 different versions for you to transition to the next chapter. Hey, you can even transition your gender, according to today’s woke oracles! If you don’t like that, you have 49 other options, including the Trad oracles who will say, “Just lean into your gender, and you will be free!”
Ping ponging from one option to another, our brains listen as an argument is proposed, then debunked and negated, leaving us confused as to where we can go.
All along, within, there was the answer you knew all along but were afraid to choose because of how others might think of you.
Perhaps you say, “The hell with the woke oracles and the Trad oracles…I’m going through Door Number 3!”
And in that catalytic moment of pure spontaneous expression, you avoid the pitfall of molding yourself as one of the People™.
You jump and land with both feet in a new green field of possibility. Author of your own life, designer of the rules of your own game.
You feel something holy, like the weeping TikToker, but you know it’s fully and intimately real—because you’ve taken ownership and made it with your own creative spirit.
There is a self-evident truth and beauty to the orientation you’ve given yourself in this wasteland. In that way, you connect with the glorious past, honor it and give it continuity into the future.
Of course, your way may not so cleanly fit into the boxes of others around you, and that may incite fear, jealousy and awe. They may stand frozen at the hallway of doors, trying to figure how they’re going to get the hell out of this decaying mess.
It all comes down to this: you must have the courage to try what works for you and you alone.
If we each trust that, we all can make it. But the more we force a solution that puts us all in some Army of Truth, marching in lockstep, the more we set up a future where each of us will be fighting each other for supremacy rather than trading our creative perspectives and building out a patchwork universe of meaning.
Tatters on the Wind: Ritual of Remembrance
Imagine you’ve returned home. It’s evening time. The sun has set.
A few torches or lights flicker in the distance.
As you approach a tent in the town square—the place of your first kiss, of your sister’s marriage, of your grandfather’s funeral—you feel a sacred sense of reverence.
This is your past. Your origin. A place of memories.
As you walk closer, you see the tent in tatters. The square is empty, abandoned. You hear the ghosts of chatter, old conversations, laughter and joy, grief and communion.
What happened?
Something has been lost. What was once together is now scattered to the wind.
And just as important, how can you honor the beauty of what gave birth to your identity? Do you fire up an app that can make the scene before you look whole again, like the teenage faces on TikTok?
Or do you take a deep breath and pick up a scrap of tent on the ground?
Musing on that piece of fabric, quietly, you begin to percolate with ideas.
Your spirit awakens. In that awake feeling, you dance across the plains of time, feeling connection with each beautiful moment that came before. Romance, birthdays, funerals, holidays.
You keep the soul of the past alive through your creative expression, in the charitable moment.
You find another scrap now, but it’s a different color.
“Perfect,” you say.
Now you stitch it to the first scrap. It looks nothing like the uniform tent in your mind, in your memory.
And yet, it contains the original spirit, in a way. Why? Because your creative act infused these tatters with vitality. The tent comes alive again, in the palm of your hand.
Individually, we’re all living out this little scene.
Write all the rules you want, optimize all the coffee habits you want, adjust your routines, add cold showers, analyze your frequency of sex and booze.
None of this can truly speak to the challenge right at hand—which is your challenge to honor the past not with cultish force but with individual creative gratitude.
You have an almost monastic silence in which to undertake this challenge. No one will bother you, unless you let them—unless you feel guilty for not being one of the People™.
The grooves of memory dance on your fingertips as you pick up these tatters—you will find what speaks to you and there is no urgent need to collect them all.
You will find what is necessary for you to move forward into the future. Your muse is your steady guide. Has it failed you in the past? No. And so don’t doubt it now.
You’ve been led back to your past to lay roses on the grave. By some serendipitous current, you’ll be led out of the graveyard, and some woodland path through the forest will break into a green field of tomorrow, where you can raise a new tent under a blue sky, a small one, just for you and a few special friends, using the favorite scraps you’ve gathered up in this ritual of remembrance.
I am currently quite full with reading requests right now, but if you have an authenticated birth time and wish to be waitlisted, contact me HERE.
A Great Unraveling
Best thing you’ve ever written here. This is your medium and posts like this are your gift.
I've been intuiting some of this for a while. Thanks for giving it form, Paul.