Reluctantly Nomadic
Events for the week of November 8-14:
The Way Forward Beyond the Dysfunctions of Modern Culture w/ Robert Gilman. November 9th, 16th, 23rd, 30th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Awakening the Subtle Body: Embodiment Practice w/ Schuyler Brown. November 10th @ 12:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 120 mins.
Becoming a Weirdtrepreneur w/ Joe Edelman. November 11th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Sex, Dating, and Why Modern Relationships Are So Fucked Up (And How to Unfuck Them) + Socratic Speed Dating w/ Raven Connolly. November 12th @ 8:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 120 mins.
Recurring wisdom gym events:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Tuesday @ 2:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Newly posted events:
Origins of the Self Part 2: From Mine and Me to I and We w/ Bonnitta Roy. November 17th @ 10:00 AM ET. Patreon and The Pop-Up School event. 90 mins.
Vibecamp: Manifesting the Vibes From the URL to IRL w/ The Vibecamp Team. November 19th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Origins of the Self Part 3: Individuation Beyond Identity w/ Bonnitta Roy. November 24th @ 10:00 AM ET. Patreon and The Pop-Up School event. 90 mins.
Escaping the 8 Prisons: A Path of Transformational Adventure w/ Clinton Callahan. November 24th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Pegging Yourself with Ludic Liberation w/ Natalia Stroika. December 8th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Homestead Incubator: A Class for Resilience and Community w/ Ashley Colby. December 13th @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Dependent Origination and Emptiness w/ Leigh Brasington. January 11th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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November 7th, 2021
I am writing at a place called Copenhagen Coffee Lab, a popular cafe chain in Lisbon with multiple locations. It is fitting being here, as we are heading to Copenhagen on Wednesday. We will be there for at least a week, perhaps heading to Oslo after.
We do not know where we will be in December, as our plans keep changing. A reader sent me the following in response to a recent journal entry: Word-on-the-digital-nomad-street these days is to check Georgia. This feels like a random idea. It also feels like a cool idea. There are so many cool ideas to actuate now.
This “digital nomad” phrase came up before in another reader’s reply: You're a digital nomad! So cool! I was aware of this phrase before, understanding it to mean people who can work remotely and choose to live abroad, mostly 30-something men working as software developers. I never thought about this lifestyle much and I even had a negative valence towards it. I just assumed they were a bunch of hedonistic kids traveling around the world to skirt responsibility.
Reading some of the resources from this unrooted community is making me feel grateful for them however. There is so much helpful information to inform us where to go next, making this indefinite travel thing less nerve-racking. The website Nomad List is especially awesome. In their website trailer they use a clip from Robert Noyce, who predicted the digital nomad community back in 1981:
And I think as we look farther into the future, we are going to find that people are going to live where it is conducive to live, not where it is conducive to work. That the movement of the work to the individual will be much easier because most of our people are doing knowledge work, not work with physical material. Today’s population can work wherever they please, without any limitations to do their work.
A large part of me really does not want to be a digital nomad. The thought of living this lifestyle does make me sad. I deeply want to be rooted, with a family, a home, warding off a dadbod while whipping out epic Stoic daddy jokes. While I may seem philosophically jazzy in these journals, I am a simple man with simple desires. The thought of traveling indefinitely makes me miss my parents and Socrates. Camille really misses Socrates.
We are pretty confused though, about where and what home is. Canada no longer feels like our home. Camille left her work at the beginning of October and we do not own much - just a car, a shitload of books, and our crazy gadfly of a cat. That’s it really. We were strategizing about purchasing a home for years. This was all that our careers were in service to really. We could purchase one but something never felt right about this. Pre-COVID, we were working in passionless careers, feeling resistant towards purchasing a home as we intuitively knew that we would also be purchasing a narrative.
We would be debt slaves to a mortgage, locking us into a fearful state, maintaining jobs the daemon did not want us to have. There is still shame about not living up to this narrative: I am 37 years old, no home, no kids, no “real job,” living like a digital nomad. I am a failure, in not achieving the success scripts I unconsciously adopted from my parents, legacy media, and the wider system I was born into.
I think those scripts are bullshit of course. It would feel much better to succeed at them first before I accuse them of being bullshit though. Failing at them, then calling them bullshit, feels pretty lame. What should a Stoic do here? That is easy. A Stoic would lean into what is with the spirit of “amor fati.” Aka love this shit hard like a good Stoic daddy.
So, mea culpa. I failed. I failed at a game I never wanted to play. I am pretty confident I had the capacity to win at this game - I was just not interested in playing it. I am interested in playing new games now, ones that help me and others come alive. If this means we have to live like digital nomads, with no fixed abode, spiritually hungry to come home, then so be it.
Clinton Callahan, a very interesting thinker, is coming to The Stoa soon for a session called Escaping the 8 Prisons: A Path of Transformational Adventure. The 8 memetic prisons he lists: mother's belly, father's control, parents' household, school system, birth country beliefs, birth religion beliefs, patriarchy (meaning a society lead by psychopathic males), and linear life plan. All these memetic prisons feel quite true.
The wise move is surely not to throw out all aspects of these prisons, as there is wisdom found in each. They probably were not even prisons at one point. Decoupled from wisdom, however, I do see them as prisons, holding us back from the dangerous yet exciting task of fully participating in building the new world.
After reading Clinton’s list, I sense these prisons are not far away from me. I have broken the locks on a few, probably escaped some, and sense the way out of others. There is an odd comfort and security being in prison though. Everything is taken care of for you. It is scary outside the prison walls, as something radically new awaits. Given that I was captive for so long, am I ready to be free?
I sense I am. I do not feel like this freedom is a glamorous thing however. I do not want my words to make freedom seem like some supernormal stimulus for others to lust over. If I am experiencing a sense of freedom right now, away from these memetic prisons, nothing feels glamorous about it. It just feels heavy, radically new, and asking me to be sharp at the knife’s edge. Basically, it is asking me to be virtuous.
Digital nomads seem to be all about creating that new hot app or making a successful online presence, so they can reach financial independence, then do whatever they want. I am motivated by something else. I am motivated by virtue. I want to rediscover what the sensemaking general calls “geometries in the choice-making landscape,” or what the Stoics and Christians call the Socratic or Cardinal virtues.
Why are more people not being resourced towards this rediscovery? I do not get it. Virtue seems like the most important thing to rediscover. It is the thing that makes wisdom embodied. Why the fuck are more people not orientated to embody wisdom?! I do not think anyone would say this is not an important thing to embody. I also imagine most people would not claim they are wisely embodied either. What is the deal with all this wisdom blindness?
I do not know, but I know I am a man daemonically possessed, nomadically questing to sense into the contours of what virtue actually is. Beyond Self-Discipline is the main vehicle I am using to rediscover this. It could be these yummy caffè lattes talking right now, but the thumos is very strong at the moment, and I am ready to get me some virtue.
So yeah, there is nothing virtuously tying us to Canada. While we appreciate the country, it is also the place where the technocratic creep is happening in a creepily fast way. Australia is probably the worst in the world in this regard, with Canada coming in second. As written about in previous entries, I was sensemaking the dark “polarity spell” that has been cast on humanity, directed towards the most “hellish scenario of the meta-crisis.” I was really annoyed at all this a few months ago; less so now.
This technocratic creep makes sense to me: corruptible bureaucracies, guided by developmentally-stunted individuals with trauma-induced sociopathy, are concerned about the meta-crisis like we are. They are just reacting, without an embodied wisdom, in the only way they know how to - a grab for more control and power. They are reacting to COVID today, global warming tomorrow, and whatever facet of the meta-crisis that will soon make itself salient.
Control and power offer the illusion of a guarantee. A guarantee of surviving, thriving, and living forever. Illusions of guarantees are not going to make a life-affirming world, for them or for us. It ultimately will not work either. I am alchemizing my annoyance for this technocratic creep as a godsend, using it as a forcing function to be digitally nomadic towards a rediscovery of virtue.
We need to get the basics right, after all, and nothing is more deliciously basic than being virtuous.
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