If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
This year, we’re being given a Full Moon on Christmas. It feels right, like the year has ripened in fullness. Not much more can be said about the year that has passed, and that’s probably a good thing, given how much common sense has degraded.
The Cancer Full Moon is quiet, private, reflective, nostalgic, wistful, traditional.
And if we look at the rest of the chart of this moment, all other planetary alignments do support this essential message of the Cancer Moon.
Granted, this will serve to further erode any sense of lingering logic in 2023, as religious fervor outweighs the general public’s ability to see how A connects to B.
Instead, in between memories and cozy foods, one will likely stumble across debates as to why such-and-such is the more righteous position to hold. No doubt the Middle East debate will try to fight its way out of the corners of some mouths, even as the crumbs of Grandma’s cookies are wiped away.
Perhaps that’s the uniqueness of this capstone moment—that, somehow, we’ve lost the world but the world has come to us, in little tatters and pieces, littered around our day to day spaces.
There may be no grand sense of what’s “happening out there”—as if anyone could really definitively say—but many of us nonetheless feel strings being pulled in our local experience.
It’s just that so few of our fellow human beings pause to understand what’s happening with those strings, and have knee-jerk reactions, defaulting to some grand geo-political narrative when really it’s an interpersonal—or personal—issue they’re battling.
What’s happened to common sense? Well, it has retired from the Public Square, because the Public Square has gone poof.
Meanwhile, each of us is left to grapple with the absence of What Once Was—some busily reconstructing this false god of security by clenching even harder to the biggest, most sweeping narratives, with the hot religious fervor of a born-again evangelical.
Some of us are amused at this—inner travelers especially, I would assume, who relish the opportunity to retreat further into the borderlands of imagination, where wild new worlds await. All bets are off, but that doesn’t mean the loss of common sense leads to chaos. It could just as easily lead to a new creativity.
This, at least, has been my thesis on how the 2020s will go down in history. The cultish demagogues versus the charismatic visionaries.
2023 perhaps represents the leap into that fray. If 2020 represented the new “shot heard round’ the world” (ha) then 2021 represented the dazed and confused rubbing of eyes as the dust settled—while 2022 represented angry and frustrated attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle. A bargaining stage gone awry.
2023, though, has been fraught with a somber acceptance. I remember, early in 2021, fervently searching the internet for discussion of how people would meet, date, work and build community in this new world. There wasn’t much to be found. The general consensus was that “things would get back to normal, slowly but eventually.”
Only in micro circles was there serious conversation about how deeply the tectonic plates of culture had shifted. I think back, for example, to some of the Twitter Spaces that I did with Keith Walkiewicz on this subject.
It’s been almost a year since I last posted on Twitter. I’ve spent 2023 wanting to get a raw, ground level, local view of the zeitgeist. I’ll still pop on Twitter to quietly observe, too, because it’s good to see what people in other U.S. cities are discussing.
The result has been very eye opening: almost everyone I know, whether I’m meeting them in person, or scrolling Twitter, is talking about how social codes are in an absolute tailspin. No one knows what really constitutes a 9-5 anymore; there’s absolute confusion around the dating world; and for every Fit-fluencer there’s a new hack or lifestyle or supplement you can buy.
It’s an absolute shattering of common sense, in favor of a hyper-local micro-tribalism.
No one even suggests they know how to fix society anymore, outside the most strident extremists and ideologues and lifestyle goofballs who feed on attention.
In Chrysalis
Some look around and realize that their fellow humans have no solution, either, and become depressed. I’ll admit, it’s not the easiest state of affairs. It’s monumentally confusing.
But others look around and say: “Ah, look, a brand new horizon! Off in the distance!”
One thing’s for certain: 2023 has represented a collective moment when the public has realized there is no going back.
In 2020, I wrote: “You will know the macro narrative by its absence.”
Which is to say: How ironic is it that the water cooler talk on Twitter in the past couple weeks has been about how people don’t meet in third spaces (some space other than home or work) like they used to?
We’re all sharing the “same” topic of conversation, similar to in the 90s, when it was natural that we’d all synch up over the latest episode of “Friends” or some shocking scene in “American Pie.”
But the darker edge is that, within this sameness, there is absence—nothingness. “Hey, you, over there! Do you see nothing around you, like I see nothing around me?”
The ruins of culture encircle us, but beyond these circular ruins are greater things to experience.
Then it dawns upon the questioner: “If the supply chains of meaning have been disrupted for me—but also for them—who, or WHAT, do I turn to?”
Faith in the Self’s connection to a great well of inspiration, imagination and vision.
Of course, faith can be corrupted. It’s easy to wave the flag of some Big Narrative and think it’s our higher self. We talked about this two weeks ago, in the newsletter titled “Nowhere Man.”
2023 represents a chrysalis moment, in which the breakdown of an old way of doing things has become inevitable.
Violent stirrings appear next year, even as soon as February, as it becomes obvious that the caterpillar of society has transformed into something else completely—something alien to itself, unfathomable, incomparable to what came before.
We may not have a full “outside of the cocoon” moment where this butterfly proudly beats its wings. There are still some shreds of the cocoon that are sure to stubbornly hang on in 2024, especially when we approach the fall, i.e. election season—that’s my current call.
But what happens in 2024 will surely give us new perspective on 2023, not simply because linear time has passed but because a non-linear leap, a metamorphic change will be seeping into collective consciousness.
It’s my opinion that much of the chrysalis was formed during the middle of the year, particularly June through early October, during the long Venus Retrograde in Leo saga, which I called the “Summer of Love” and which I unpacked here with the help of extensive film reviews.
It seems to me that deep, permanent change came for our interpersonal relations and sense of how we individually “see ourselves in the mirror” so to speak.
By now, at Christmas, summer 2023 seems like another galaxy away, but its effects are front and center, as it now becomes commonplace for the topic du jour to be “Why are men and women not kind to each other anymore?” or “Where do you meet people nowadays?”
Every decade in the 20th century has put a narrative at its center. Even the 2010s will be remembered, I believe, as a kind of cold, hazy, drugged up hellscape where tech bros, plastic personas and brazen corruption took hold, a dour aesthetic reflected in shows like “Mr. Robot.”
In contrast, it’s my opinion that the 2020s will come to be seen as a patchwork revolution of individual consciousness, where it may SEEM as if the metallic coldness remains—but then you realize these are the inert codes of decades past, pieces of rubble from a Big Tent culture that tumbled down, which you can combine and restore life to, magically creating a vital empire of your own, that extends beyond you and can stitch together, even if temporarily, with the empires of others.
You can still mourn the absence of What Once Was, but it lives on, in a reconstituted version, in your heart, in your mind—and that’s where the change is, in how you fit various pieces of it together, so that it means something to YOU, exclusively, but in shareable form.
It’s whatever you want the next reality to be—focus on an image, and create it. Feel into your home in the wild.
Maybe it’s an old fashioned in a vintage glass tumbler, nestled on a leather chair, next to a turntable playing pop punk from the early 2000s. You’re wearing some wool socks from a site you swear that only hippies from Berkeley, California know about. Fill your senses with what you want to bring into the world. Combine the disparate pieces of a shattered culture. Abandon the lifestyle police that say “if you do that, you must also like this.” Paint your way across the wasteland. Splatter, drip and stumble—but most of all, enjoy the process.
Thanks for sticking around in 2023. Next year is sure to be a wild ride. I’ll be working up ever new ways to convey to you what’s unfolding in the quickly evolving zeitgeist. Stay tuned.
Until next time, Merry Christmas.
If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
Thanks for your posts this year. I wish you a successful 2024.