The Opportunity Landscape
Tomorrow’s event:
The Glass Bead Game w/ The Metabeaders. Every Saturday @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 120 mins.
Newly posted events:
The Virtue of Surrender w/ Alanja Forsberg. June 2nd @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
A Bestiary of the Anthropocene w/ Nicolas Nova, Maria Roszkowska, and Nicolas Maigret. June 14th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Practices for Authentic Living w/ Susan Campbell. July 12th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
Design Leadership for an Emerging Future w/ Lisa Norton, Maria Giudice, and Greg Thomas. May 5th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
The Stoa's renaissance man in residence, Greg Thomas, returns to The Stoa. He brings with him fellow Stoan Lisa Norton and Maria Giudice, to discuss the intersection of design thinking and leadership.
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April 23rd, 2021
I stopped masturbating when I was in my late twenties.
A reader just emailed me about this, after he read my eros-inspired entry from yesterday. He heard me previously talk about how I've stopped masturbating (or fapping to use internet parlance), and inquired about the benefits of stopping.
Like most men in their twenties, I used to masturbate, but doing so now would feel like a strange thing to do. I can speculate that my thumos levels are high thanks to not fapping for almost seven years, and there does seem to be a reasonable case to make there, but I do not have any “quantified self” data to prove this.
I generally recommend the no fapping thing for men, but I am not dogmatic about that recommendation. The reason for the recommendation boils down to this: cultivate agency in relation to one’s appetites, especially one’s sexual appetites, or to use the “right relationship” framing: get into the right relationship with one’s sexual appetites.
This is about temperance of course, one of the cardinal virtues. Temperance is about moderation, and arriving at the right relationship with pleasurable things. I have been discussing this a lot with younger men in my coaching practice, and it feels like I am serving as an older brother to them in many ways.
You look around, there are so many distractions these days. Good. That means there are so many opportunities. In Wednesday’s entry I suggested that fear can be reframed as an opportunity, or a forcing function, to cultivate courage. It's similar with all of these distractions, or “supernormal stimulus,” to use a fancy evolutionary biology term. The Wikipedia page cleanly describes supernormal stimulus as “any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.”
Porn is a big supernormal stimulus for men, and most men I know are not in the right relationship with it. I wrote about porn before, and about our pornified anti-culture that is becoming increasingly sterile, deadplaying towards self-termination. This Stoic has too much existential hope to be blackpilled by all of this though, because I do see all of this as a Stoic opportunity.
I have been invited to do an Interintellect salon on Stoicism in May, and I’ll be arguing that Stoicism is needed for the collective challenges we are facing. I am super horny for virtue these days, but I am not interested in proselytizing Stoicism, as the metamodernist in me is happy to put on a transperspectival hat, and see that multiple perspectives are converging on the same message.
It is also a cool move to use a new mental model, as an attractor towards this convergence, and “live player” is a pretty good mental model, and it is the one we used for the upcoming Rebel Wisdom course called Becoming a Live Player. It was a good sensemaking practice for me in designing this course, as it allowed me to sense deeper into what I will call here the “opportunity landscape” that places like The Stoa, Rebel Wisdom, and the wider Sensemaking Web have been sensing into for the past few years.
There are three facets to the opportunity landscape that the course will discuss: the meaning crisis, culture war 2.0, and the meta-crisis. I am creating a promo video for the course, so I will use this journaling time as an opportunity to think some of this through, and I will muse on each facet below …
The Meaning Crisis. To use Pierre Hadot’s languaging, there is no widespread “philosophy as a way of life” that encourages an ecology of practices, that when practiced imbues a sense of meaningfulness. The philosophies that are widely available—the ones that are (dis)embodied in our leaders and institutions—do the opposite, and fill us with a sense of meaninglessness.
Generally speaking, people see that things are fucked up, but do not know what to do about it. Mark Fisher calls this “reflexive impotence,” which is the sense that one cannot do anything about the world’s problems except acknowledge them. A self-fulfilling prophecy then emerges, or a world-fulfilling one, towards continued fucked-up-ness. This is a huge drag of course, which leads to what the x-risk folks call “existential despair.”
Culture War 2.0. This is what all of my non-journal writings to date are about. To quote my piece in The Side View on memetic mediation:
We can view this new culture war, Culture War 2.0, as philosophical battles acted out in the noosphere: the term Pierre Teilhard de Chardin chose to refer to our collective consciousness. The internet’s ability to connect a world of different minds has allowed us to witness the fragmented nature of our current collective mind, lending the noosphere a schizophrenic quality.
Thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Jean-François Lyotard basically predicted all of this, and we are now living in the age they warned us about. The public discourse about the topics that matter most has become a shitshow, and the two general movements seem to be this: become a culture warrior and weaponize oneself, and allow oneself to become weaponized, or escape into what Yancey Strickler calls the dark forest.
The Meta-Crisis. The first two components can be unfolded into this one, as the meta-crisis is the catchall meme that includes both the meaning crisis and the culture war, but also all the x-risks and suffering risks (or s-risks) that could result in our extinction or neuter our potential and put us on a path towards a collectively hellish existence.
Nick Bostrom’s x-risk typology is pretty tight and is worth the look. These are some of the “bangs” he mentions that could eliminate humanity: misuse of nanotechnology, nuclear holocaust, misaligned superintelligence (AGI), weaponized biological agents, and runaway global warming. I am much more concerned about s-risks though, including the current risk of a “malevolent bureaucracy” overreacting to a pandemic, installing a creepy panopticon, and unwittingly restricting our collective potential.
Yeah, none of this is cool, and we need our finest galaxy brains deployed towards the meta-crisis, while imbued with meaningfulness, without capitulating to the fear of The Cancel God memeing down their necks.
The live player course is divided into three-parts using the tripartite epistemic model that Daniel Schmachtenberger uses, while reframing it with serious play—first-person play (intrasubjective knowledge), second-person play (intersubjective knowledge), and third-person play (objective knowledge).
While all three of these epistemic plays are needed for each facet of the opportunity space, the three plays do map over nicely to the three facets: first-person playing with the meaning crisis, second-person playing with the culture war, and third-person playing with the meta-crisis. The course will delve into all of this, and I may write more about all of this in other places, as I am being called to write in a more “public intellectual” sort of way, as I did with my culture war writings.
I can hang in that domain, and perhaps I should start hanging out more in that domain. I do not see many people writing about all of this stuff in a cogent way that is both synthesizing and inspiring, so perhaps I’ll need to. I do not like being a galaxy brain though, that is not my style, but fuck man, are you just going to wait around for others to daemonically set the world on fire?
The meaning crisis is an opportunity to discover meaningfulness. The culture war is an opportunity to discover communitas. The meta-crisis is an opportunity to discover how to be at the knife’s edge together, because we’ll need to be at the knife’s edge together. The power of gods needs the wisdom of gods, and all of this crazy shit is a great opportunity, and great opportunities are inspiring.
It is also an opportunity for us to become whole, or to speak religiously: it is an opportunity to become holy. The sensemaking general is right when he implored us to seriously fucking play. Maybe all of my non-masturbation is coming through now, but the thumos is fully here, and now is the time to seriously fucking play, in a timeless way.
The opportunities are here. Let us lean into them. Let us be grateful for them. Let us be surprised by them. Who knows what we will discover, and who knows what we will become, but we do know we need to become.
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