Jamie, I appreciate your candor in naming the failure modes of countercultural experiments—psychedelics without integration, polyamory without depth, communes without resilience, gurus without character. You’re right that critique is needed.
But after forty years of community work, I’ve seen a pattern I call the Ancient Blueprint: early Christian communities of care, Gandhi’s village movement, Dr. Ariyaratne’s Buddhist Sarvodaya Shramadana (5,000 towns in Sri Lanka), and the Parallel Polis of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.
These weren’t naive utopias. They were durable, virtue-based experiments that built parallel societies able to outlast empire and ideology.
So I want to press you: do you only want to lament, or will you acknowledge that real models exist? It’s not that “community doesn’t work”—it’s that community without formation, structure, and shared virtue doesn’t work. Where those are present, renewal not only survives but scales.
I’d love to explore whether your critique can evolve into constructive design.
Are you open to a conversation about how these tested blueprints might inform today’s search for resilience?
He said in reply to my comment that it was tongue-in-cheek. Pretty well-polished effort in that regard, right? 😂 I like your examples and your question.
Jamie, this is so well-considered. After we circumnavigate worlds of novelty and shiny objects, we often find it's the obvious, simple stuff that's most meaningful. Thank you for sharing this wisdom.
As someone who tends to lump concepts together more than divide them, I couldn't agree more about there being nothing new under the sun. We've got new packaging, better marketing, and now psychedelic backing, but the same general themes among our religious and social norms: don't lie-cheat-steal, love thy neighbor, the golden rule, etc. It's also not surprising that so many distancing themselves from organized religion by identifying as "spiritual but not religious", taking the good and leaving the dogma. So far no genocides have been committed in the name of energy crystals and healing frequencies, so much less cultural baggage there.
Where I see the disconnect with what we call conservatism, which seems more like a euphemism for something much darker, is with how we prioritize these generally agreed upon principles. I'd certainly put "love thy neighbor" far above some obscure old testament reference to stoning adulterers and mutilating foreskins. And I can't even fathom how one can justify separating children from their caregivers and shipping them off to concentration camps... but if it exists it's gotta be old testament or something equally archaic.
I honestly struggle to reconcile how people can cause so much harm to others while touting lofty religious principles that in no way guide their actions. Maybe this is a uniquely American phenomenon right now, but "atavistic death-cult" seems a more apt description of our fusion of technofascism with religious fundamentalism. Not much moral good is being conserved here.
And sorry to get dark and semantic there, but yeah, I'd like to see the term conservative refer to those positive things that we've conserved over millennia, from Paganism, Shintoism, Buddhism, maybe even Quakers, etc. And refer less to just the talibanesque, old testament relics that we've carried forward despite our better natures.
I found the anti-community argument to be disappointingly flimsy in the face of so many existing arguments (and successful projects) that demonstrate its value.
It’s harder than many realize, yeah. But so is the hyper-individualistic systemic collapse meltdown taking us right off the edge of the cliff.
I resonate with writers like Michel Bauwens and Richard Flyer who are advocating for and living bioregionalism. Their arguments are sturdy, as is their praxis and demonstrable case studies.
Beatle George Harrison was once asked about his experience with LSD and he remarked, you really only need to do it once to get it. The interviewer then asked, so you only did it once? He just smiled. You could see he obviously did lots more, but that more from his experience didn't matter. I got to a similar place. In those days, we got by, again more Beatle wisdom, with a little help from our friends... not some corporate set of support services. And yes, there is noting like giving your all, presence-wise to your kids and your partner, and being together as a family. So I guess conservative I am as well...)
Even if community or communes don't work it's not like our current hyperindividualism is helping either. In fact it's far worse as someone who has experienced both. Also cities in the victorian and industrialized ages were extremely miserable for the non rich. So are suburbs (for many kids especially).
Jamie you gave away the game at "Chaotic Neutral" where the tagline on that box in the meme outs you as a fundamentally dishonest person. Always have to diss the conventional wisdom, so now that certain streams of the mainstream have finally gotten the beginnings of a clue, you have to pretend to piss in the punch bowl out of an attachment to contrarianism? I think you're (supposedly) becoming "conservative" for all the wrong reasons (but I don't even believe you that you are such). I don't actually disagree with most of your points (except for the bit about spirituality, that's just bitterness because you apparently failed to succeed thus far, I'm sure through no fault of your own: what you said is great but it's a small part of the real deal) but I've been following you for a few years to now post my first comment and say: I think you're pulling our legs out of jadedness or you really did just lose your testosterone. Those vaccines probably didn't help, and you're now apparently trying to curry favor with your newly-ascendant Austin tech bro conservative funder crowd by fakely donning yourself as such. Tell your boy Christian—who interviewed me in June for your overpriced writing course and to whom I wrote an intricate, vulnerable essay using your 9-point checklist of Culty Cults to refute his accusations that I'm an up-and-coming cult leader and who has still not gotten back to me in response—that I'm no longer interested because you have apparently now renounced your previously-helpful and impressive work (even though you just quoted from it here a few weeks ago) and would clearly not be in the corner of anyone flagshipping one of the million experiments we need in Recapturing The Rapture to overcome the polycrisis. My writing and publicity coach can't be an unscrupulous hack, sorry. Peace out👌🙏👌
vaccinated chaotic neutral! you got me utterly dead to rights, I'm afraid. (And if you can't tell tongue in cheek from moral confusion, I'd suggest you keep honing that spiritual discernment of yours). I'd also suggest you read the essay Make America Hallucinate Again about the MAPS conference, and any of my pieces calling out TechnoFascism from this spring. You tell me–-does any of that remotely sound like currying favor with tech bros?
Hey Jamie, thanks and touché on the response. You certainly got my attention with the clickbait title/article and now that I got yours, and have re-re-read it (I had already read all your recent ones when they posted, hence my surprise at this seeming reversal) I'll say: okay, so you admit to having overstated your case a bit here, or was it all tongue-in-cheek (like some of my comment and apparently some of yours)? You were clear in the article, eventually, that you meant "conservative" in a different way than we usually politically mean it these days—here more like "careful, wise"—but correct me if I'm wrong: you're not actually meaning to this-strongly repudiate ALL of these deep-rooted social movements that you've been championing so well for so long (even amidst your periodic trenchant critiques, this being a particularly snarly one), right? You didn't actually "TURN" conservative in this sense, I suspect, in any significant way except now being more openly strident in these particular contrarianisms (which I can actually relate to, hence the degree of vitriol you sensed in my comment: gotta be one to see one). I myself am somewhere between True Neutral and Chaotic Good, so your Chaotic Neutral is on my pallette. For the record, I only half-agree with you here about psychedelics, I completely agree about polyamory (started getting into that in 2000—back then honesty right out of the gate about wanting to see other people prevented many more relationships than it allowed, for better or worse, and now I'm old enough not to care much about it), I 3/4 agree about community (spent 5 years living in a polyamorous off-grid one in Hawaii so I got double dosage and solid hours re-parenting adults—see psychedelics for the missing piece there) and I 3/4 disagree about spirituality (as I said). Isn't it understandable that in the first several decades of Western culture trying to turn itself back from the abyss with these four much-needed social movements, there would be some ignorance/stupidity? Your call-outs of it are far from completely off-base, and as another commenter said after me, are you interested in constructive approaches to applying these movements in ways that do apply more care and wisdom (ie. that work)? Finally, you truly are a great writer (other than your rampant one-sentence paragraphs in these missives) so if you do actually have better morals than Jack Sparrow (you seemed like you did and only this article made me wonder), and if Christian is back from Burning Man, can you tell him that I'd still appreciate his verdict (and even yours) on the Moral Power Of (My Non-Culty-Cult) Story? As I told him, my spiritual discernment, which I have been assiduously cultivation (thank you) did call me to want to participate with you all in January.
"Yes," some objectors declare, "I would like to expand my consciousness, but I feel that I must do it for myself."
To this, our usual reply is that doing everything for oneself can be an unbearably limiting factor as well as an exercise in egotism. What if we had to weave all our own clothes, grow our own food, make our own paper and so forth? In actuality we accomplish hardly anything without external instruments, tools or technological aids. Our manifest interdependence attests to nature's determination to force us to overcome isolationist tendencies. Even our two most essential physiological functions, eating and breathing, serve as constant reminders that in every respect we are obliged to use what lies outside of the confines of the bodily organism.
In the end, we do nothing alone and everything by our selves. Let us remember, however, that these myriad intermeshing "selves" are composite facets of the one transcendent Self in all. If we serve one another, if we accept help from outside agencies, that merely shows our faith in the supreme Identity that constitutes the sum and substance of creation.
People have also objected that spiritual development should not be hastened by "unnatural" means. But what really is natural? If it is permissible to harness physical forces such as steam and electricity, why should we not utilize the heretofore untapped powers of mind and soul? Directing the evolutionary energies of human consciousness need not contravene natural law. Indeed, there may be a spiritual mandate that impels homo sapiens to overcome the inertia of animal instincts through a deliberate, self-willed forcing process.
It would indeed be gratifying if nature automatically raised us up the evolutionary escalator. Instead, climbing requires hard work. For the most part, we have to ascend on our own legs, slowly, painstakingly, against a multitude of resistances. At the same time, there is an Intelligence that lends a helping hand. We believe that ketamine can be an instrument of that great redemptive cosmic principle that makes us want to move on. The wholemaking impulse called synergy is as natural as the disintegrative impulse called entropy. Curiously enough, however, laziness, dogmatism and conservatism often masquerade as compliance with God's will, while the determination to better oneself provokes howls of protest from those who do not wish to see the old order disturbed.
~1977, JOURNEYS into the BRIGHT WORLD by Marcia Moore and Howard Sunny Alltounian, M.D.
I think leading the Indian independence movement and ending up with the celebration of Indian independence on your birthday, writing what some have considered the greatest philosophic work in human history, and numerous other concrete accomplishments suggests some kind of practical grasp of things (I'm referring to Aurobindo Ghose)
Perhaps raising a child and exhibiting one's painting among the great impressionists, giving life changing talks on feminism to women in Japan in the 1920s, organizing a community of over 2000 people and running it for nearly 50 years, and initiating an intentional community (Auroville) which despite efforts of the Indian government to control it, remains powerful (I'm speaking of Mirra Alfassa) suggests some practical grasp of things.
And your "conservative" benchmarks are much more likely to be seen in urban liberals than rural conservatives!
I did not see any real evidence of your having done the interior journey. You remind me of Husserl who took his anal eyes along to look inside. I knew someone who claimed to be a Buddhist because he had memorized a bunch of Buddhist teachings. You mentioned Carl Jung but I see no evidence that you have done any shadow work. The Foucault/Derrida brand of postmodernism was analytical to a fault. Complexity is not the same thing as depth. Milton Friedman is an example of a shallow (and in my view very evil) fool in economics. My saying all this is likely a colossal waste of time. People who spend their life in the shallow end of the pool can only see the surface because there is no depth to be found there.
I would be more interested in reading of your journeys into the shadow world and your encounters with your demons(daemons?). I could not care less about who has patted you on the head and told you what a good boy you are.
It’s the whole concept of “shortcuts” that make me sigh. I’m ok with the seeking, and I think there are some great shortcuts that I have found to be helpful. But what I appreciate the most about this entry is the reminder that most of the good stuff in life comes from putting one foot in front of the other.
Made it through about a third of this. Cmon. Nothing new? 1st, how would you know that definitely? Tried everything “new”? 2nd, so what if there isn’t? Take what’s “old” and make it work for you. Stop the jaded rumination on your failure to figure life out.
ahh the rando internet troll... thanks for the life advice, but here's a puzzler for ya–what if I wrote this for fun, and I have always believed the things I've believed? Neither jaded, nor confused, but irreverent?
“Rando” assumption. I read you intermittently, so not random. And sorry if you feel trolled. What if I also wrote for fun and irreverence? Everyone can’t play?
I've felt this way since I was 29, and I've always been puzzled by the intense excitement/hyper-neediness/hyper-competitiveness/hyper-ambition. Some folks need to believe their movie/autobio-dance-number is high-budget, thrilling, superspecial, and miss the specialness of simply living. The most loving, powerful, and truly good people I have known and know are simple working people who are devoted to family and friends. The left/right labels no longer work for me. Now that I've typed that, labels never stuck with me. I shudder like J. Krishnamurti. I think civilization is in unprecedented territory. To be ever so trite, ain't it complex! I felt this post from Living Philosophy pairs well with Jamie's offering here. 🪦 RIP Hippie Leftism ... Let's all keep producing and consuming data/content for the TESCREAL AI Lords and come what may. Do what's best for you and yours. Jordon in North Carolina didn't surprise me one bit. Live simply, it will be good for everything. Hugs.
Jamie, I appreciate your candor in naming the failure modes of countercultural experiments—psychedelics without integration, polyamory without depth, communes without resilience, gurus without character. You’re right that critique is needed.
But after forty years of community work, I’ve seen a pattern I call the Ancient Blueprint: early Christian communities of care, Gandhi’s village movement, Dr. Ariyaratne’s Buddhist Sarvodaya Shramadana (5,000 towns in Sri Lanka), and the Parallel Polis of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.
These weren’t naive utopias. They were durable, virtue-based experiments that built parallel societies able to outlast empire and ideology.
So I want to press you: do you only want to lament, or will you acknowledge that real models exist? It’s not that “community doesn’t work”—it’s that community without formation, structure, and shared virtue doesn’t work. Where those are present, renewal not only survives but scales.
I’d love to explore whether your critique can evolve into constructive design.
Are you open to a conversation about how these tested blueprints might inform today’s search for resilience?
He said in reply to my comment that it was tongue-in-cheek. Pretty well-polished effort in that regard, right? 😂 I like your examples and your question.
I would add Auroville. Thanks for your comment, Richard. i really enjoy your substack posts too.
Jamie, this is so well-considered. After we circumnavigate worlds of novelty and shiny objects, we often find it's the obvious, simple stuff that's most meaningful. Thank you for sharing this wisdom.
thought of you with that compression test analogy ;)
I was going to say something profound, contrarian and witty but fuck it, I'm going to clean the shit bucket out instead.
As someone who tends to lump concepts together more than divide them, I couldn't agree more about there being nothing new under the sun. We've got new packaging, better marketing, and now psychedelic backing, but the same general themes among our religious and social norms: don't lie-cheat-steal, love thy neighbor, the golden rule, etc. It's also not surprising that so many distancing themselves from organized religion by identifying as "spiritual but not religious", taking the good and leaving the dogma. So far no genocides have been committed in the name of energy crystals and healing frequencies, so much less cultural baggage there.
Where I see the disconnect with what we call conservatism, which seems more like a euphemism for something much darker, is with how we prioritize these generally agreed upon principles. I'd certainly put "love thy neighbor" far above some obscure old testament reference to stoning adulterers and mutilating foreskins. And I can't even fathom how one can justify separating children from their caregivers and shipping them off to concentration camps... but if it exists it's gotta be old testament or something equally archaic.
I honestly struggle to reconcile how people can cause so much harm to others while touting lofty religious principles that in no way guide their actions. Maybe this is a uniquely American phenomenon right now, but "atavistic death-cult" seems a more apt description of our fusion of technofascism with religious fundamentalism. Not much moral good is being conserved here.
And sorry to get dark and semantic there, but yeah, I'd like to see the term conservative refer to those positive things that we've conserved over millennia, from Paganism, Shintoism, Buddhism, maybe even Quakers, etc. And refer less to just the talibanesque, old testament relics that we've carried forward despite our better natures.
I found the anti-community argument to be disappointingly flimsy in the face of so many existing arguments (and successful projects) that demonstrate its value.
It’s harder than many realize, yeah. But so is the hyper-individualistic systemic collapse meltdown taking us right off the edge of the cliff.
I resonate with writers like Michel Bauwens and Richard Flyer who are advocating for and living bioregionalism. Their arguments are sturdy, as is their praxis and demonstrable case studies.
Beatle George Harrison was once asked about his experience with LSD and he remarked, you really only need to do it once to get it. The interviewer then asked, so you only did it once? He just smiled. You could see he obviously did lots more, but that more from his experience didn't matter. I got to a similar place. In those days, we got by, again more Beatle wisdom, with a little help from our friends... not some corporate set of support services. And yes, there is noting like giving your all, presence-wise to your kids and your partner, and being together as a family. So I guess conservative I am as well...)
Even if community or communes don't work it's not like our current hyperindividualism is helping either. In fact it's far worse as someone who has experienced both. Also cities in the victorian and industrialized ages were extremely miserable for the non rich. So are suburbs (for many kids especially).
Jamie you gave away the game at "Chaotic Neutral" where the tagline on that box in the meme outs you as a fundamentally dishonest person. Always have to diss the conventional wisdom, so now that certain streams of the mainstream have finally gotten the beginnings of a clue, you have to pretend to piss in the punch bowl out of an attachment to contrarianism? I think you're (supposedly) becoming "conservative" for all the wrong reasons (but I don't even believe you that you are such). I don't actually disagree with most of your points (except for the bit about spirituality, that's just bitterness because you apparently failed to succeed thus far, I'm sure through no fault of your own: what you said is great but it's a small part of the real deal) but I've been following you for a few years to now post my first comment and say: I think you're pulling our legs out of jadedness or you really did just lose your testosterone. Those vaccines probably didn't help, and you're now apparently trying to curry favor with your newly-ascendant Austin tech bro conservative funder crowd by fakely donning yourself as such. Tell your boy Christian—who interviewed me in June for your overpriced writing course and to whom I wrote an intricate, vulnerable essay using your 9-point checklist of Culty Cults to refute his accusations that I'm an up-and-coming cult leader and who has still not gotten back to me in response—that I'm no longer interested because you have apparently now renounced your previously-helpful and impressive work (even though you just quoted from it here a few weeks ago) and would clearly not be in the corner of anyone flagshipping one of the million experiments we need in Recapturing The Rapture to overcome the polycrisis. My writing and publicity coach can't be an unscrupulous hack, sorry. Peace out👌🙏👌
vaccinated chaotic neutral! you got me utterly dead to rights, I'm afraid. (And if you can't tell tongue in cheek from moral confusion, I'd suggest you keep honing that spiritual discernment of yours). I'd also suggest you read the essay Make America Hallucinate Again about the MAPS conference, and any of my pieces calling out TechnoFascism from this spring. You tell me–-does any of that remotely sound like currying favor with tech bros?
Hey Jamie, thanks and touché on the response. You certainly got my attention with the clickbait title/article and now that I got yours, and have re-re-read it (I had already read all your recent ones when they posted, hence my surprise at this seeming reversal) I'll say: okay, so you admit to having overstated your case a bit here, or was it all tongue-in-cheek (like some of my comment and apparently some of yours)? You were clear in the article, eventually, that you meant "conservative" in a different way than we usually politically mean it these days—here more like "careful, wise"—but correct me if I'm wrong: you're not actually meaning to this-strongly repudiate ALL of these deep-rooted social movements that you've been championing so well for so long (even amidst your periodic trenchant critiques, this being a particularly snarly one), right? You didn't actually "TURN" conservative in this sense, I suspect, in any significant way except now being more openly strident in these particular contrarianisms (which I can actually relate to, hence the degree of vitriol you sensed in my comment: gotta be one to see one). I myself am somewhere between True Neutral and Chaotic Good, so your Chaotic Neutral is on my pallette. For the record, I only half-agree with you here about psychedelics, I completely agree about polyamory (started getting into that in 2000—back then honesty right out of the gate about wanting to see other people prevented many more relationships than it allowed, for better or worse, and now I'm old enough not to care much about it), I 3/4 agree about community (spent 5 years living in a polyamorous off-grid one in Hawaii so I got double dosage and solid hours re-parenting adults—see psychedelics for the missing piece there) and I 3/4 disagree about spirituality (as I said). Isn't it understandable that in the first several decades of Western culture trying to turn itself back from the abyss with these four much-needed social movements, there would be some ignorance/stupidity? Your call-outs of it are far from completely off-base, and as another commenter said after me, are you interested in constructive approaches to applying these movements in ways that do apply more care and wisdom (ie. that work)? Finally, you truly are a great writer (other than your rampant one-sentence paragraphs in these missives) so if you do actually have better morals than Jack Sparrow (you seemed like you did and only this article made me wonder), and if Christian is back from Burning Man, can you tell him that I'd still appreciate his verdict (and even yours) on the Moral Power Of (My Non-Culty-Cult) Story? As I told him, my spiritual discernment, which I have been assiduously cultivation (thank you) did call me to want to participate with you all in January.
"Yes," some objectors declare, "I would like to expand my consciousness, but I feel that I must do it for myself."
To this, our usual reply is that doing everything for oneself can be an unbearably limiting factor as well as an exercise in egotism. What if we had to weave all our own clothes, grow our own food, make our own paper and so forth? In actuality we accomplish hardly anything without external instruments, tools or technological aids. Our manifest interdependence attests to nature's determination to force us to overcome isolationist tendencies. Even our two most essential physiological functions, eating and breathing, serve as constant reminders that in every respect we are obliged to use what lies outside of the confines of the bodily organism.
In the end, we do nothing alone and everything by our selves. Let us remember, however, that these myriad intermeshing "selves" are composite facets of the one transcendent Self in all. If we serve one another, if we accept help from outside agencies, that merely shows our faith in the supreme Identity that constitutes the sum and substance of creation.
People have also objected that spiritual development should not be hastened by "unnatural" means. But what really is natural? If it is permissible to harness physical forces such as steam and electricity, why should we not utilize the heretofore untapped powers of mind and soul? Directing the evolutionary energies of human consciousness need not contravene natural law. Indeed, there may be a spiritual mandate that impels homo sapiens to overcome the inertia of animal instincts through a deliberate, self-willed forcing process.
It would indeed be gratifying if nature automatically raised us up the evolutionary escalator. Instead, climbing requires hard work. For the most part, we have to ascend on our own legs, slowly, painstakingly, against a multitude of resistances. At the same time, there is an Intelligence that lends a helping hand. We believe that ketamine can be an instrument of that great redemptive cosmic principle that makes us want to move on. The wholemaking impulse called synergy is as natural as the disintegrative impulse called entropy. Curiously enough, however, laziness, dogmatism and conservatism often masquerade as compliance with God's will, while the determination to better oneself provokes howls of protest from those who do not wish to see the old order disturbed.
~1977, JOURNEYS into the BRIGHT WORLD by Marcia Moore and Howard Sunny Alltounian, M.D.
And if your piece was really a 5.2-month offsetted April Fool's then please consider my comment to be the same! 😂
I think leading the Indian independence movement and ending up with the celebration of Indian independence on your birthday, writing what some have considered the greatest philosophic work in human history, and numerous other concrete accomplishments suggests some kind of practical grasp of things (I'm referring to Aurobindo Ghose)
Perhaps raising a child and exhibiting one's painting among the great impressionists, giving life changing talks on feminism to women in Japan in the 1920s, organizing a community of over 2000 people and running it for nearly 50 years, and initiating an intentional community (Auroville) which despite efforts of the Indian government to control it, remains powerful (I'm speaking of Mirra Alfassa) suggests some practical grasp of things.
And your "conservative" benchmarks are much more likely to be seen in urban liberals than rural conservatives!
I did not see any real evidence of your having done the interior journey. You remind me of Husserl who took his anal eyes along to look inside. I knew someone who claimed to be a Buddhist because he had memorized a bunch of Buddhist teachings. You mentioned Carl Jung but I see no evidence that you have done any shadow work. The Foucault/Derrida brand of postmodernism was analytical to a fault. Complexity is not the same thing as depth. Milton Friedman is an example of a shallow (and in my view very evil) fool in economics. My saying all this is likely a colossal waste of time. People who spend their life in the shallow end of the pool can only see the surface because there is no depth to be found there.
ahhh the old forensic keyboard warrior! I forgot to post my buddha and jung merit badges in the endnotes. will do better next time
I would be more interested in reading of your journeys into the shadow world and your encounters with your demons(daemons?). I could not care less about who has patted you on the head and told you what a good boy you are.
Never really comment here, but damn. This is just....incredibly clarifying.
Having gone down these roads a bit, I resonate with this Jamie.
It’s the whole concept of “shortcuts” that make me sigh. I’m ok with the seeking, and I think there are some great shortcuts that I have found to be helpful. But what I appreciate the most about this entry is the reminder that most of the good stuff in life comes from putting one foot in front of the other.
Made it through about a third of this. Cmon. Nothing new? 1st, how would you know that definitely? Tried everything “new”? 2nd, so what if there isn’t? Take what’s “old” and make it work for you. Stop the jaded rumination on your failure to figure life out.
ahh the rando internet troll... thanks for the life advice, but here's a puzzler for ya–what if I wrote this for fun, and I have always believed the things I've believed? Neither jaded, nor confused, but irreverent?
“Rando” assumption. I read you intermittently, so not random. And sorry if you feel trolled. What if I also wrote for fun and irreverence? Everyone can’t play?
pretty much
I've felt this way since I was 29, and I've always been puzzled by the intense excitement/hyper-neediness/hyper-competitiveness/hyper-ambition. Some folks need to believe their movie/autobio-dance-number is high-budget, thrilling, superspecial, and miss the specialness of simply living. The most loving, powerful, and truly good people I have known and know are simple working people who are devoted to family and friends. The left/right labels no longer work for me. Now that I've typed that, labels never stuck with me. I shudder like J. Krishnamurti. I think civilization is in unprecedented territory. To be ever so trite, ain't it complex! I felt this post from Living Philosophy pairs well with Jamie's offering here. 🪦 RIP Hippie Leftism ... Let's all keep producing and consuming data/content for the TESCREAL AI Lords and come what may. Do what's best for you and yours. Jordon in North Carolina didn't surprise me one bit. Live simply, it will be good for everything. Hugs.