These interesting times are an invitation.

Hey. It’s been awhile.

You doing ok? I’m still here. I’m doing ok.

I’ve withdrawn from social media for over a year now, but I still ask my spouse about it from time to time. “How are ‘the feeds’ today? What hot slop are the algorithms and AI are serving up? Have I missed anything?”

I know I’ve missed a lot: birthdays, new babes, passings, weddings, holidays. I haven’t done improv in years. I still don’t feel comfortable unmasked in shared, indoor spaces for myriad reasons (mostly medical) so I’m still videochatting, Facetiming — I’ve even had some hours-long voice-only calls, a nostalgic throwback to teenage times.

That’s what company and community used to be, after all, for millennia. Our human hardwiring for social interaction, support, and love is what drew us to social media in the first place (and keeps you coming back today). We posted, wrote, shared for and to one another across space and time. We carefully crafted webs of focus, intention, and action and merged the personal and professional, the public and private, for the heady sake of progress, or the heartfelt purpose of mining the profound from the mundane.

I remember when LiveJournal was sold to a Russian buyer in 2008. I mostly remember the disruption and dissolution of bubbles and circles and members moved to other digital ecologies and platforms. The digital elders among us are well used to this pattern by now whether it was Xanga, Geocities, Angelfire, Friendster, Myspace…

But the way we move across online platforms can feel less like planning a pre-meditated move and more like fleeing a natural disaster: I’ve carelessly, passively abandoned the archival detritus of years of my life documented faithfully through digital media because I didn’t think to download everything (the cringe!) and have since lost the password or server hosts somewhere needed to clear up space and it’s just gone now.

That’s not true of all platforms or periods of life, and might not even apply to most webizens of ye olden times. Yet framing the action as a response is still useful. Were we responding to the change of ownership away from someone familiar? Was it the fact it was a Russian buyer? Was it that the platform would now permit (gasp) advertising?

Was it the the wake-up-call that the product of a devotional practice, years of writing and reading and sharing across varying degrees and filters of intimacy — my living, breathing diary didn’t actually belong to me since it could be both bought and sold?

I still spent the following years diving deep into Web 2.0, defaulting much (if not most) of both personal and professional development and engagement to occur across digital platforms, building (and obsessively editing) my Personal Brand, and putting my “digital native” fluency to use professionally by doing the same on behalf of Business Brands.

This has worked for a lot of us very well for a long while. We love those hits of feeling so good and moving so fast and I was so lost in the sauce I couldn’t believe how anyone could shirk the opportunity to Build a Brand and Claim Your Destiny online! I mean, if your online content is gonna be bought and sold, might as well get what you’re worth.

Right?

When 2020 happened, like most in the Global North it became a reason to get extremely online. Even more than I’d been before. We were all doing it, the adoption rate in perfect counterbalance to the transmission speed of a new contagious virus. We had to. We didn’t have much of a choice.

Then my health started getting very weird in ways that were no longer easy to dismiss or overlook. My usual coping mechanisms weren’t working as well as they used to, or became entirely unavailable to me for circumstances beyond my control. I tried harder and harder to figure things out to make a fix and stay in the game but the only thing that worked to give my central nervous system a chance to come back to my body was to —

This has not been an easy time for me, let alone everyone else. Nor is it over, not nearly.

Composting Capricorn

You have already been feeling the history of this time, at once foreign and familiar. For those who follow astrology, 2008 was the year Pluto moved into Capricorn to stay through 2023-2024, a period inviting us to “see the corruption that lays at the heart of our relationship to the earth’s resources.”

For those who follow finance, 2008 was also a milestone moment we now call the Great Recession. Structural vulnerabilities had long already been complex, so the damage was systemic and fractal across material (housing market imploded) and metaphorical (house as symbol of the mythic American Dream, imploded) and macroeconomic (Too Big to Fail). Even at the mythic level, where we weave our story about money in real-time, the financial chatter (and emotional volume) at that time was certainly too loud for me to ignore, and for the first time in my life I felt my own innate curiosity begin to focus on finance. I started listening more closely instead of automatically tuning it out.

As a high-verbal human I took it personally that words like mortgage-backed securities and derivative swaps were being bandied about on NPR Marketplace and I couldn’t follow any logic. And I’m someone who grew up with a higher-than-average amount of financial awareness and literacy compared to most of my peers.

So I worked on shifting my perceptual filters to focus on and follow money. Education and certification about our complex financial systems, the machinations of our interactions, the channels and nodes that collect and disperse. Yet the deeper I dove into the mechanics of our financial system, the more I kept coming back to story in both my research and my private advisory practice.

That’s not to say calculations don’t matter. But the stories we tell ourselves about money can have far more profound effects on our lives than a cash flow projection or Monte Carlo simulation. Because the United States does not promote financial literacy as part of federal secondary education curriculum, most of the money stories my clients don’t realize they’re keeping have to do with lessons learned from mistakes made.

Maybe talking about money was treated like a taboo growing up. Maybe a family member made a dire financial mistake, traumatizing many people in ripple effects over space and time. Maybe they’d been living high on the hog to “go broke slowly at first, then all at once” because they inherited wealth they were never taught to steward wisely. Maybe childhood poverty and perpetual paycheck-to-paycheck carved a scarcity scar so deep even the mere idea of generosity is regarded suspiciously.

The main reason to pay attention to money, I’ve found, is to understand how deeper ideas about wealth and worth can warp the weft of our weaving in this world.

The closer we trace the first origins of written language, even the earliest instances consistently appear next to numbers. Maryann Wolf describes language as evolving as a sort of “envelope” for numbers. It’s like if we created numbers for the purposes of counting, it seems we created language for the purposes of accounting.

Managing diverse resources like livestock and grain and wine complicates the use of numbers: How many of what? We need language to add context. Three cows. Six loaves of bread. Nine wineskins. This matters because three cows may be worth more than six loaves of bread. Depends on what you value, what you think something is worth. (And who’s doing the valuing.)

This blew my mind because I’d always felt like language and economics were sworn enemies, forever foils and perfect arch-nemeses. I endured far more jokes about my employability when I got my Philosophy degree than when I got my financial certification. But they’re not that distinct from one another.

Both communication and commerce are situations involving people coming together. We needed letters and numbers to record these moments of transaction, of exchange, of relating to one another.

Whether it’s Pluto’s final days in Capricorn or something(s) else, everything feels like it’s been at fever pitch for a while. Consider the intensity of these last days as a final exam reviewing events going all the way back to 2008 (or even the Industrial Revolution).

Where can you see the corruption at the heart of how we relate to flora, fauna, mineral, and maybe even the immaterial, the metaphysical? If you’re still waffling, climate collapse is making sure you will. Where’s the rot that lays at the heart of our relationship with money? And of course, we can no longer feign polite ignorance in passing over our favorite resource of all: human resources. People.

We are of this earth. We use others. We are used. Sometimes it’s easier to notice, and we have made a lot of progress along the way. But we still have work to do.

Can you see the corruption at the heart of how we relate to each other, our selves?

What is no longer working? Where has help become harm? What do we decide deserves to wither on the vine, destined to remain the decay of the past?

Rot is part of a natural cycle: the old crumbles becoming compost, a new and fertile soil feeding new seeds and shoots.

Now is the time we are called to embrace the shadows that have haunted us over the years — because these shadows are ours, are us, and they come bearing gifts.

All Aboard, Airheads

As we approach the Age of Aquarius, we are entering an age of abstraction.

If all the astrology talk is turning you off, treat it as a metaphor: focus instead on technology, information flow, and the collective. We’re going from a world that feels fixed to one that is in constant flow.

The exhausted paradigm we’re exiting is elementally earth: tangible, material matter, deliberate slow pacing, lower Schumann frequencies, centralization, linear narratives, tradition, rules, rulers, and hierarchies of power. All-caps answers carved in stone. Platonic ideals, binary reductions, and “father knows best.” Well-worn roads.

Where we’re going is up, away, and far out just like the element of air: intangible, immediate, immaterial (or maybe even metaphysical, mystical, magical?), distributed networks, non-linear narratives, higher frequencies and more vibrations overall across spectrums we have yet to discover. Much more diversity, now binaries behave as springing-off points for exponential variation.

Way, way off the beaten path.

What excites me most is this promise of multiplicity — of far more possibilities than we could possibly have conceived under the heavy thumb of a fixed natural-materialist Newtonian-Cartesian cosmology.

A few days ago on a call with my Dad he said something I’ve heard him say many times before: the world runs on money, it all only ever comes down to money, something along those lines. But this time when I heard him say it, I felt something inside me shift. I didn’t roll my eyes, or dismiss it like usual. This felt like a confession. Here, in the stark truth of language, he repeated his world view just as he has my entire life. Life is money.

Turns out, I disagree. For decades I’ve tried to take the commerce out of communication, or the communication out of commerce, but it never got me very far because both are already/always still siblings sharing the same context: moments of relational exchange between people.

Quantum field theory seems to agree: the world is something we are constantly co-creating reality in relation with one another through our myriad entanglements, agreements, disagreements, and ongoing negotiations.

We come together in commerce, hence the focus on money. We come together in communication, so we look at language. We come together in worship, so we focus on faith. We come from families of origin, so we honor our traditions.

The money, like language, are just different vehicles of exchange for these relational moments. If that’s the case — what exactly are we exchanging together?

Discovering Riane Eisler for the first time (this year!) was a total eureka moment. Even for a binary framework it’s like some kind of singularity formula but for social dynamics. It’s suspiciously clear, almost simplistic, useful, succinct, and lucid. And practical.

Is a person using power to dominate, or to care for another person?

I’m applying this lens to everything these days and I’m finding it easier to respond instead of react (or numb out with cold logic). This lens helps me strategize to work smart, not hard, in how and where I engage. I feel more agency in more of my activities — more like I’m improvising, instead of reciting lines from old scripts. Less like what I do in life is somehow being directed.

What makes this Domination/Partnership lens so useful, so multipurpose?Microsolidarity.cc offers the best explanation I’ve seen yet, in that it’s:

1. Fractal (common features at all scales) - works to evaluate groups of any size (within the family, team at work, larger corporation, city, country, continent, etc.) and illustrates mutually interactive scale dynamics (like connecting how features of German family life created conditions for Nazis to take over)

2. Radical (getting to the root) - the core character is dominating Others through control, but we often lose that forest for the trees (sexism, racism, ageism, etc.)

3. Constructive (focus on what you want to see more of) - focus effort and energy on what you want to see more of

Sit with that third one a bit.

The Microsolidarity.cc author reflects upon their earlier times spent “in groups that are oriented ‘against’ something: anti-capitalism, anti-globalism, anti-racism, anti-hierarchy. While it’s important to understand the forces that are opposed to your mission, I think it’s often counterproductive to organize a group around an ‘anti-’ framing. It’s easy to unify people around what they’re opposed to, but it’s a temporary & shallow bond. It’s dangerous to know more about what you’re against than what you’re for. It creates a culture of infighting & witch-hunting. We become oversensitive, jumping at anything that vaguely resembles the thing we’re against.”

I won’t assume to know what you’re feeling right now, but if you know anything about me you’ve probably seen me cry at least once. If I’m famous for anything it’s for being a Highly Sensitive Person. I’ve been accused of being oversensitive plenty of times. But this year was the first time I got stuck in such an oversensitive state it impaired daily functioning. Too many things beyond my control were affecting asymmetrically.

It took experimenting with all kinds of adaptations across every part of my life to come to the realization in Microsolidarity’s 3rd point: Too much of what I was feeding my brain focused on things I loathe instead of love. Breaking news, villains, a stream of fresh daily horrors without end, and especially via video, visual, short formats, and infinite feeds (which pose unique risks and benefits as we’ll explore later on).

I’d been paying too much of my precious attention on destructive forces, and not nearly enough on constructive sources. I needed to adjust not only the quantity, but also the quality of my information — inviting more inspiration to engage my energy creatively.

These interesting times are an invitation, so this newsletter is one way I’m responding.

This is meant as an offering, and I intend to surface more questions than answers, the stuff that sticks in your brain even if it doesn’t all sink in at first. I’ll introduce some of the allies who continue supporting me through these unprecedented times: techniques and traditions and systems of thinking, ways of wording and worlding all so we can do the steady, endless work of restoring right relations for the mutual flourishing of all. Constructive in its deconstructionism, and compassionate in the face of destruction.

Post-humanist thinking, process worldviews, and indigenous traditions offer tantalizing options to help soften our Clockwork Orange stare so the Magic Picture pieces can float into place. In this new world we’re creating, exploring how to hold paradox has more to offer than standing your ground or sticking to your guns.

If the right questions have more value than answers in this new era, where are the opportunities in your life you can choose to use your power to care for someone, something?

What would it look like to begin this practice with yourself?