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.
Welcome to eclipse season. We’ve officially wrapped up our creative interpersonal summer story and now begin our big picture geo-political fall story.
You can go back to my previous newsletters, weeks ago, to see that I was prepping everyone for this intense transition. I also mentioned that it wouldn’t necessarily be a hard break—instead, we’d see a dovetailing of the summer and fall themes, much like a song’s outro becomes the next track’s intro.
I suggested that in your own life, and on the world stage, you’d see a dovetailing between artistic expression or romance/interpersonal relationships and politics, authoritative corruption or even social decay.
A few recent headlines capture this transitional zeitgeist.
First, the death of Ryan Carson, a community activist who was slain in Brooklyn while returning from a wedding with his girlfriend. The story spawned a vicious debate, ranging from those who gloated over Carson’s death—citing that his liberal ways fostered such random acts of violence—to those who speculated that his girlfriend was more in love with social justice ideology than her deceased boyfriend, due to her inability to identify the attacker in a lineup.
The other, equally grisly headline, comes from the Middle East, where Hamas allegedly raided the Supernova music festival and massacred attendants the weekend of October 7. So, from the outset, we have the scenery of creative expression. We also have threads of romance, as much of the news has centered on Noa Argamani, a young woman who attended with her boyfriend but was separated from him while being abducted by Hamas. Originally rumored to have been killed, recent videos have been posted showing her alive in captivity. “Coincidentally,” Argamani’s birthday falls on this weekend’s eclipse.
On Monday October 9, following a weekend of surprise attacks by Hamas, airstrikes were launched by Israel against Palestine, leading to hundreds of deaths on that side—and prompting speculations that a larger conflict involving the US may be in the cards.
The divisive reception of these two headlines is what I want to focus on in this newsletter. We’re already aware that this fall is about magnifying geo-political tensions, so let’s go a step deeper. What we’re concerned with is developing our “peripheral vision”: in other words, this eclipse cycle offers us the chance to transcend binary ways of looking at the world. I call this giving side eye to the apocalypse. Things may be tense, but there are possibilities in the air.
The purpose of this newsletter is not to speculate on the possibility of a world war, but merely to map nascent and emergent trends.
In order to thus understand the rather macabre trends this fall—and to perceive threads of growth within them—we need an image. The image that I’ve settled on for both eclipse newsletters is “The Big Bomb.” In Part One, we’ll discuss what happens if we keep the bomb in our peripheral vision rather than front and center in our stories.
Many times when you scroll through a site like Twitter, you’ll see multiple theories of what the Big Bomb even is, or will be.
Some will say that US government debt is the Big Bomb about to drop, or perhaps another looming government shutdown. Others feel the Big Bomb will be literal, perhaps a nuclear conflict involving Iran, spurred by the Israel-Hamas conflict. And yet others see increasing institutional corruption in courts and law enforcement—coupled with events like the Carson incident—leading to a spiral of widespread social distrust and domestic violence on US soil.
Each one of these narratives tries to envision a big picture geo-political or socio-economic trigger, but isolates a very specific cast of characters: racial strife in US coastal cities; religious conflict in the Middle East; or rising interest rates on US government bonds, which slows economic growth.
But what we will begin to learn is that each of these Big Bombs is actually a smaller bomb tethered to the other smaller bombs, creating a patchwork of crises through which a new social order will be born. No one bomb is the biggest and thus deserving of centerstage in a broad brushstroke narrative.
For example, the Hamas-Israel conflict influences buyers to seek safe haven assets like US government bonds, keeping yields down and thus reducing pressure on household borrowing costs. It’s like a perverse equation in which religious war is good for the war on economic distress. But there can always be a loss in global confidence that the US can truly pay its bills. There’s a sense that the country is resting on its laurels as a merchant of long-term debt, prompting buyers of that debt to demand more bang for their buck—more return for their risk.
It’s the classic Chinese fingertrap conundrum: the more you try to escape, the stronger the bind becomes, stitching the disparate pieces tighter while simultaneously preventing a solitary, unitary solution.
So how does this apply to your personal life?
Accurate Assessments
For one, you may notice increased boundary issues. You may be more willing to walk away from deals you once tolerated in the past, to your detriment. For example, you may become more critical of which sources you agree with in order to understand economic conditions or political tensions. You feel like you’re creating your own reality in the 2020s, rather than passively absorbing it from the 24/7 information complex.
Likewise, multiple minor crises may begin to pop up in your life, sending you reaching for some red button to “Big Bomb” them away, once and for all, totally and completely. You’re ready to divorce, quit your job and sell everything to go live in a cabin in the mountains.
But just like Twitter discourse on US racial relations won’t be enough to solve the Israel-Hamas conflict, any changes rectifying decay in your career won’t solve your love life problems.
And yet…there IS cause for optimism here, through a Chinese fingertrap paradox.
First, each of these minor irritations is isolated to a particular cast of characters, keeping problems in your life from becoming a united and undefeatable juggernaut. While each of them in isolation may seem like a Big Bomb that deserves to be center of attention, that’s really not the case.
For example, as long as your aren’t literally married to your company’s CEO, there is some “geo-political” partition between work life and your love life. To explain it another way: Carson’s death in Brooklyn isn’t putting boots on the ground in Israel.
But…but. As we’ve said here, these events ARE interconnected. They form of tapestry of decay and conflict that lets us know that all is NOT right with the current world order.
A decaying rule of law in the US speaks to its inability to keep its house in order and be a confident merchant of debt—or even enter another war, for that matter.
Likewise, you may notice that the behavior of people-pleasing your boss is just a few neighborhoods away, relatively speaking, from the behavior of appeasing your partner when they begin to criticize your tiniest flaws.
But the purpose of pointing out this interconnection in world events—and in your personal life—is not to promote an apocalyptic scenario of endless crises, but to present a situation in which a breakthrough follows a breakdown.
It’s becoming palpable that something NEW and DIFFERENT must emerge from the decay, transition and loss.
A birth follows a death.
Similarly, an interconnection of patterns in your life—which nonetheless prevents a single nuclear solution because none of them deserve center stage—is cause for celebration.
It shows that your life is metamorphosing and changing into a new state of affairs, even as the old and decayed issues bubble up into your personal consciousness.
If you think this sounds like a lot of October will be allowing the decay to fall away, then you’d be correct.
Much like the leaves will begin to decay and fall now, we will access metamorphosis by BEING WITNESS TO IT.
Sorry, hustlers: this is less about forcing a result and more about cultivating your capacity to experience the terror of unadorned beauty.
Let’s keep going.
The Terror of Unadorned Beauty
Many of our institutions have been stripped bare. More than that, our language has been stripped bare.
Discourse in some kind of shared Public Square is a long gone fantasy now. We stand in the ruins of the Tower of Babel.
Each tribe seeks proof of their own philosophy in events like the Carson incident or Hamas incident.
Events are no longer “events”—they are merely dramatizations that each tribe spins to suit their own story.
Thus, nothing happens in the world anymore.
Any human activity is already pre-processed into a meme, already a tribal talking point. Dead on arrival.
New life is required.
The global spectacle of humanity has shattered into billions of micro-narratives. This is not the 90s. A woman in Paris and a man in Iowa are not discussing last night’s episode of “Seinfeld” at the office water cooler with their friends.
That Parisian woman in now a Work From Home Influencer, sipping a hipster boutique smoothie with the latest trendy herbs, while broadcasting to her Twitch tribe some commentary on the Hamas terrorists while doing a makeup tutorial.
Meanwhile, that guy in Iowa is on a Facebook group organizing with neighbors to buy local properties before Chinese investors do.
Everyone is the star of their own Reality TV show—and while this seems a bit dark, it does speak to a resurgence of individual heroism in a world that’s become lackluster from years of collectivist resentment (all the social justice hashtag revolutions of the 2010s).
Not all heroes are created equal, of course, so don’t expect some “Global Awakening” in which the Iowan farmer and Parisian influencer team up to take on the global warmongering elite.
Everything will be hyper-local despite the omnipresence of communication platforms that allow for global connection.
Even the narrative of “revolution” is becoming unadorned, which is why you see so much infighting now among social justice radicals. We should see this as a positive development.
Because what’s happening is that “revolution” is becoming more beautiful as it becomes more naked—in other words, it’s now becoming more POSSIBLE because it is being de-conditioned away from centralized ideological stories that put a death grip on personal consciousness.
Your revolution is becoming your own, and no one else’s. That’s what I mean by “hyper-local.”
And not only is that perfectly fine, it’s great.
Just the same, you might notice in October an increased ability to revolutionize various sectors of your life by bearing witness to their unadorned beauty.
Again, just like going down the Israel-Hamas rabbithole won’t have you cracking the code on the Fed Reserve, telling your boss off won’t save your marriage—that’s a feature of a different era, a pre-2020 era, like in “American Beauty” when Lester revolutionizes his marriage after blackmailing his worm of a boss.
Instead, you’ll more likely see that the multiplicity of things “wrong” with your life is what ensures that something will change—that a new season will be birthed. A beginning wrapped up in an ending, as I’ve seen one commentator put it.
With peripheral vision, you’ll be aware of each continent of your consciousness as geo-political crises erupt, gaining stronger and stronger belief in your ability to metamorphose into a different state of affairs.
There is a strange hope in realizing that a state of affairs is unsustainable.
One leaf falls…and then another…and then another.
Then one fine day, you see a bare branch. The terror of unadorned beauty. You see the thing for what is really is. A change of season has arrived in your life.
You bear witness, feeling the full glory of it all.
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.