Comments Are Turned Off

Notes on a silent revolution.

If you’re interested in a one-hour audio recorded reading that gives you strategies for solving an issue that you’re facing, write me:

zeitvillemedia@protonmail.com

I’ll send you a small FAQ sheet and put you on a short waitlist. An authenticated birth time (hour and minute) is required to participate.

My ebooks are available for purchase here.

---

We’ve all heard the phrase before:

"That's just how it's always been done."

It's a way of saying "no, this is the status quo and will continue to be the status quo."

Lately in online discourse, this kind of attitude is coming under fire. It's referred to as a Boomer generation bias—or even being spiritually Boomer, regardless of whether one was born in the boom period after World War II.

It's a curious situation. Boomers are often criticized by certain subsets of the younger generation, namely the Neo-Trads. This is due to Boomer association with modern revolutionary movements in the 60s—which is seen by some today as “too permissive, too liberating.”

And yet the Boomer’s legacy is also the word No.

In memes online, they are depicted as agents of the status quo—clueless and oblivious to the unique, complex struggles of the generations below them.

Particularly the struggles to secure meaningful work, a quality place to live and even love itself—all of these issues create a wedge between Boomers and many people born from about 1980 onwards.

(Although there is a micro debate on whether Gen X is sympathetic to millennials and Gen Z.)

In a practical sense, it really doesn't matter when one was born, because as the phrase spiritual Boomer suggests, it really comes down to the attitude one embodies towards reality.

Some people experience the current reality as a fragmented mess, while others will say “same as it always was.”

You see, the primary wedge between these divergent camps in Western Society is based on a debate.

This debate is about the efficacy of the individual in society at large.

From the perspective of someone who sees the world as a static chessboard on which pockets of resources are arranged (a.k.a. the Boomer) the eternal “solution” to any problem is show up and be present.

That’s all the individual has to do.

Boomers enshrine this wisdom with the aura of time-honored values, like responsibility and duty.

Not only will the individual’s identity be taken care of—including all the turmoil of working out one’s personality and preferences—but the most desirable things that one could want in life, including love and work and shelter, will be given to them in exchange for meeting the status quo halfway as it were, in a kind of reciprocal agreement.

The individual and society exist in a kind of civil handshake.

But others see current society as fraught with landmines and ever-shifting signals, making it hard to discover reliable pathways to success and meaning.

This split in understanding society is about to become more extreme, more radical.

And yet the strange, exciting thing about this cold standoff? It will likely force many people to put down their respective ideologies, and stand in awe of the new, beautiful and terrifying possibilities awaiting humanity.

So let’s dive in and explore.

Winter of Our Discontent

Some serious discontent is in the air, and as usual, we see it in recent online discourse.

Many are angry about suggestions that all a young ambitious person has to do is work at a fast food chain like Panda Express or Chipotle, in order to have every need satisfied in life, from meaningful work to shelter to a mate.

From the perspective of the aggrieved, not only do they disbelieve in this promise—they also point out the second order effect of not receiving an organized identity in the process.

They point out that work also supplied a Boomer with a community persona, which thus integrated them not just into a company fabric but into a wider American Dream.

For purposes of today’s newsletter, we might call the American Dream a collective aspiration for nationwide prosperity, which nonetheless allowed individuals to pursue their chosen purpose—ensuring happiness at the micro level while maintaining harmony at the macro level.

But again, from the perspective of the aggrieved, they get nothing for their efforts in return from society today except perhaps more suffering.

Of course, the end result of this is a complete rejection of this societal contract.

People see no reason to participate in society when there's no reciprocity or exchange.

Sometimes this apathetic or frustrated attitude will veer into utopian fantasizing, but the result is all the same:

The angry have no use for people who would speak in favor of a “status quo philosophy.”

Now, whether one agrees with either camp—well, that’s an entirely different matter.

It was interesting to watch as people wandered into the fray and tried to neutrally appease both parties, but then were savaged by both parties.

For example, some people tried to tell the down and out that they need to lower their expectations.

They followed this mantra up by saying they were sympathetic to the fact that younger generations have the short end of the stick. That didn't exactly land well on the ears of the aggrieved.

And yet the stubborn younger participants didn't secure themselves much cultural capital by suggesting that all that's needed is a rearrangement of the system to be more in their favor.

It was quite interesting watching large numbers of people try to publicly grapple with intellectual abstractions like society and the status quo, perhaps for the first time in their lives, because they now have skin in the game and the stakes are more real than ever.

Sounds like a bit of a cliche, but Sigmund Freud had something to say about this.

So let’s check that out. We’re looking at his landmark book from 1930, “Civilization and Its Discontents.”

A Fire Inside

In the book, Freud wrote about the “primal horde” in which young men essentially assassinate the elder out of a libidinal frustration.

You might call it a predictive book for the calamity that we see ourselves in now.

It’s a bit like lyrics from The Who song, “Don’t Get Fooled Again”:

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Boomers may have dropped the revolutionary ball, but's not exactly clear yet either whether the generations below them will avoid repeating the same lesson.

Freud spends much of the book’s early section around a sight in Rome—the appearance of an ancient building at the bottom of some modern, more trivial building. New Rome is built on top of Old Rome.

He then discusses the idea of a palimpsest, which is a stone tablet that might be rubbed smooth to accommodate new text. He says the human unconscious is a lot like that: it’s not that we “forget” things but they become more repressed, like old stone etching that get smoothed out but still show up as little nicks and scratches.

Freud’s insights here help us to frame what the real bone of contention is in today’s generational debate.

It’s about evolution. Our very concept of society is evolving, and there are traces of the old that we can point to, but something new is over-writing them.

To cope with this, both the Boomers and the younger generations have different modes of nostalgia.

If Boomer nostalgia says that “it’s a shame people don’t want to do what always works and still works,” then anti-Boomer nostalgia says “things used to work and it’s a shame they never will again.”

The anti-Boomer is all about Vibes. Here’s an example:

To me, what we are about to deal with transcends the political.

What we are concerned with is something more libidinal, primal and related to life force. It's religious in nature, and it relates to the spirit of humankind at the level of self-belief.

This is tricky territory because some people will not even enter this conversation because they fear wandering away from the rational materialist view of reality, which you could argue is a kind of status quo conservatism.

Fact is, I think people will have to adapt to this new level of talking about things because it will be increasingly self-evident that models for discussing society are frail at all parts of the spectrum.

We will have to unburden ourselves of old thought forms if we want to break away and enjoy freedom.

But do people really want freedom?

Let’s keep going.

When Hell Freezes Over

Freud goes on to discuss a concept he comes up with, called “the return of the repressed.”

It’s an eruptive event where primal libidinal forces—which could not be sublimated into something more refined and religious—end up discharging themselves into the world as a distorted and monstrous expression.

And this is precisely the writing on the wall currently. It should be evident to many that when you have large swaths of people feeling that society itself is no longer a concept that can be viscerally engaged with or redeemed, then you're going to see widespread destabilization.

Whether it be through violence and looting and vandalism, or increased rates of mental illness and quality control disaster, those who are in the camp of "just do the thing and get the cookie" will be increasingly confronted with general breakdowns in societal cohesion.

Here’s a neat graph illustrating that point:

These foundational linchpins that have been taken for granted will gradually erode until they suddenly evaporate at a whim.

Sure, each camp will stubbornly assert their original perspective, probably saying that we just need to stay the course, while the other says nothing will work.

But the fact will be that pressing issues, such as infrastructure breakdown, will require immediate action outside the locus of intellectual or ideological debate.

For example, one may think of the fires on the west coast or even the floods in North Carolina.

Many have tried to close the gap quickly on this emerging need for new societal definitions, by recommending a return to traditional spaces like churches.

The funny thing is you’re seeing this solution being taken up by both Boomers and the newer generations. When both camps are now arriving at similar “solutions” then we're near a reckoning.

We’re about to close a loop. Nearly every camp has been thinking that our problems can be “fixed”—whether the attitude is keep going or burn it all down. But the problem-solution mindset is flawed when it comes to individual meaning.

Something more at the gut level, more at the level of libidinal life force, will have to break through our detached intellectual definitions in order to create some sense of meaningfulness.

People are tired and burned out. Their mental models are fried. They just want to be happy and have things work.

And so I predict that there will be a critical mass of people who realize that this problem-solution dichotomy is just the wrong way to go about aligning the individual in society.

What I think will happen, then, is a completely revolutionary approach to one’s sense of their own individuality, because we will have to build it beyond these concepts and constructs and abstractions that we take for granted, whether we're a Boomer or not.

Let’s close with some final thoughts.

Blank Canvas

I've long said that there may be some strange cultish implications as a result of this revolution.

Once upon a time, the Internet was a place of information exchange generally, whether that was how to fix your car or how to assimilate into emo subculture. Then came the 2010s with the Web 2.0 adoption of social media. It was more about “hey look at me, I'm at the beach! And you see me! OMG!”

Since 2020 we’ve moved into this kind of gatekeeping persona where the attitude is: “Only through me and my regimen and my way of looking at the world will you find the CORRECT way to live!”

But I believe that something bigger is rising above this cult of self.

What that is exactly remains to be seen. I think it will have to emerge moment by moment, in a kind of flow state that doesn't necessarily align with our typical notions of history, where a spark of conflict leads to stable resolution.

Because again stable resolution on the heels of a problem is the paradigm that the Boomers and even the anti-boomers share in common. That's their unity, their kind of metaphysical agreement that individuality gets sorted out through an agreement with society.

Boomers believe that it will happen by way of just showing up and doing the thing while anti-boomers believe that it won't happen until their software is installed.

Here are a couple of examples where the anti-boomer becomes the Boomer. It’s a schizophrenic mix of being uber-puritan or narcissistically rebellious.

To me, neither one of these positions is viable, though I’m typically sympathetic to people who feel cast aside.

At the same time, I don't really share the perspective of the outcasts who demand adherence to a new utopian promise.

They are not engaging the world at the level of primal instinct and sensuous engagement, even though many of them will try to fashion themselves that way by focusing on things like physical strength, beauty and Nietzschean philosophy—all understood superficially, of course.

It feels very trite to me, like a natural extension of the Boomer preference to sensationalize the mundane rather than just enjoy it.

So what I want to leave you with today is assurance for a couple of things.

One, that the brooding tension that seems to simmer beneath the surface is not your imagination. It is true. It exists.

Secondly, with reference to this tension, there is a liminality to this time.

As we go deeper into February, we're going to have to uncomfortably wade through feeling of transition.

What is society if it's not something we enter into agreement with, alongside others?

What is an individual if it's not supported by institutions and traditions such as churches and stable workplaces?

Or what is an individual if it's not just some superficial mess of talking points that one assembles and into a cult of personality online?

These are the types of questions you will see more and more of in public.

Lava will burst through this tension, creating much discord.

But the lava can cool and create new islands, and this liminal moment of tension waiting to take form can also fill us with inspiration.

Instead of foreboding, we can choose to feel anticipation for the unseen, unexplored territories that are awaiting us as long as we have the willpower to pay attention to them and validate them.

Guidance of our attention and our validation—I think this will be the basis of the new individuality that we experience.

Then from all of these micro realities there will appear a society that is currently unseen, and has yet to be written .

So yes, it's a grassroots decentralized view that I have, where things will work from the bottom up going forward .

It’s up to us to step forth into this gamble. It requires new ways of seeing, new ways of validating the world around us .

I have a feeling that it will take the form of simple joys that almost feel religious and transcendent in nature, as people release and surrender their attachment to old paradigms.

I think one of your first hints that people are stepping into new levels of individuality will be that they're taking drastic steps.

They may stop a certain way of talking or presenting themselves to the world. They may stop going to certain venues or attending work in a certain way .

There will be an air of refusal and rebellion, although it may be subtle and somewhat formalized, as if it's a revolution that's happening internally.

Gradually the outer world will be entirely different.

A silent revolution, if you will.

My message to you today is that it's happening right now. It's true and it's underway and nothing can stop it.

---

If you’re interested in a one-hour audio recorded reading that gives you strategies for solving an issue that you’re facing, write me:

zeitvillemedia@protonmail.com

I’ll send you a small FAQ sheet and put you on a short waitlist. An authenticated birth time (hour and minute) is required to participate.

My ebooks are available for purchase here.