The Man Who Killed Culture

An investigation of the artisan and his shadow.

Mar 13, 2025

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Grief and unsolved mysteries: two things many of us could be dealing with in the month of March.

In the previous newsletter, “Kissed By A Tidal Wave,” I described how the month opened with a wave of disillusionment and a hope for redemption. As the water recedes now, and the waste is carried out to sea, we’re left with a kind of void.

But is it really an emptiness?

Perhaps the only thing rinsed off was a ghost, phantom or mirage.

We’ve known in our bones for awhile now that the task is to rebuild our respective communities. Starting with the first newsletter of 2024 (titled “Step One”) I walked you through a painstaking process. Newsletters that year were largely devoted to describing a process of “waking up.” The masses would give up on the dream of things “going back to normal” in a pre-2020 way. Macro reality is gone and micro realities are here to stay.

I think I did a good job of that, and in January of this year, I wrote that I wasn’t really sure what forms and topics this newsletter would take on next—only that it would be something different.

What I’ve started to realize is that the difference is ME: the changes from within are now manifesting in the outer world, resulting in an extremely fluid experience of reality.

I firmly believe this is the case for each of YOU reading this as well.

It’s like we carry this burden or some grief of wondering what life would be like if the pandemic had never occurred in 2020. But we are able to let go of that heaviness by transmuting it into purpose.

Part of this transcendence comes from shadow work. There’s an interesting line in the song “Disarm” by The Smashing Pumpkins: “The killer in me is the killer in you.”

Who killed culture? Well, we can certainly think of some bad actors, like the cults that I chronicle here.

But in many ways, we all killed culture, because we were fed up with what it had become. Perhaps we were only aware of that subconsciously at the time, in a liminal way. But it’s halfway through the 2020s now, and many are ready to move on.

A hallmark feature of this spring is that the unconscious desire to move on will continue to become more conscious. Headlines about reducing government waste are simply a basic manifestation of this trend.

As always we ask two questions: WHY is this trend happening now and WHAT can we do about it? So let’s dive in and explore.

Call In The Clean Up Crew

Taking out the trash is a humble task. Sometimes it’s easy to let things clutter up our space, even if they’re ghosts. Messes are oddly comforting. They have a “thereness” to them. A presence, even if it’s a dirty presence.

Hidden in our hearts is a desire to begin again, and by accepting that, we align with the trend of trash being removed.

This isn’t the bootstrap philosophy of the 2010s, “just hustle and DO it!”

No, this is release, surrender, acceptance. Let the trash go, let the phantoms go.

Some will deny this trend completely. Instead of removing clutter, they’ll be removing their involvement from reality even more going forward. Listlessness, escapism, hollow hedonism and numb politicking will actually continue to surge from here in pockets of the population. It’s possible that a mental health crisis could appear in headlines a few weeks from now.

But many others will find a renewed sense of positive aggression, understanding that some kind of ruthless removal was necessary in certain corners of our life, but not because we have some grand vision to “fix society.”

Instead, many of us know that the local versions of society stopped working for us long ago, and we’ve badly needed a dose of energy to get moving with whatever micro-reality we now inhabit.

As a result, the flipside is that other pockets of the population will make drastic decisions to cut out certain habits, lifestyle behaviors and/or routines that keep them stuck in some kind of false eternal call to war:

“ALRIGHT I’M REALLY GONNA DO THIS NOW…no, wait, I don’t have the time, resources or energy for it…”

The experience of fits and starts is a feature not a bug of this transitional time, as we head into the back half of the 2020s, which I’ve described on X as the ACTION oriented part of this chaotic decade.

The first half of the 2020s was really about FAREWELLS and we needed that critical look at old philosophies and ideologies to keep ourselves from being hamstrung.

So here we are, in the liminal space of spring 2025, where FAREWELLS meet the CALL TO ACTION.

Unshackled, we’re trying to feel our muscles again. It’s almost like many of us have been homebound for half a decade (perhaps literally).

Sometimes able to wander out to the boundaries of the unknown but always coming back to the Decayed City to resolve some karma or contract.

Longtime followers know that the Decayed City has been a frequent motif in my work, going back to the serialized fictional stories that I published under the title of “Zeitville” in 2021. We took a last glimpse at that image in the fall of 2024 as Pluto wrapped up its 15-year journey in Capricorn—I encourage you to read those newsletters if you haven’t.

Well, so that’s all good, right? For the most part it is, and I bet you welcome the movement. But again, it’ll be fits and starts. It’s not like rocket fuel right out of the gates. June and July look like times when we’ll really be zooming—July especially.

Until then, we are a bit like a baby deer or baby rabbit born in the first days of spring, trying to coordinate something that should be second nature. Walking, talking, engaging—all things that we have to relearn, so to speak.

Having the faith to fall back on muscle memory, especially our emotional and cognitive muscles, will be a key part of navigating mid March.

So let’s dive in and explore how RE-LEARNING will help us overcome grief and rebuild our hopes.

Monochrome Mirage

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I always like to give you concrete examples of the trends in play, so you can see them more easily.

Take this week’s post about a former Wendy’s fast food restaurant:

The implication here is that the aesthetics of a clean, well-lit fast food restaurant is enough to inspire feelings of longing, nostalgia and even regret or grief in the viewer. “If we only still had this, then we would be happier.”

This is one of those ghosts which is due to be washed away, but the poster clings on tightly by suggesting that it was something maliciously “taken away”—leaving the viewer to now feel resentment, aggression and perhaps a need to go to war.

Yet the viewer never gets off their ass. They sink further into the monochrome mirage, lamenting that the future will never be as good as the past.

It may be true that some things are washed out forever, and we need to mourn that. Transitional times could be tragic, melancholic or even terrifying.

But transitional times are also moments of community, radical change and visionary creation.

I’m not sure at all that these kinds of posts serve the communities they aim to speak to. Instead, this is a message of personal disempowerment. It is a message of anti-creativity. “Nothing can be created, even a small creation in your corner, because they took all that is good and holy from your world.”

Well, this is a reason why I’m not keen to use the term “world” in the old global sense anymore. Yes, the world has been destroyed in many ways. That’s quite bad.

But instead of believing this is a game you can never win, it’s more accurate to call it a game you can never lose.

The world is no longer some stable thing you step into and then rearrange, like photos on a table in a well-lit Wendy’s restaurant.

That’s the conceit of the resentful poster, who doesn’t understand that aesthetics actually have a historical basis. People like this are addicted to the idea that images are superficial, only there to inspire ideological bloodlust or some kind of “vibe.”

They don’t realize—or don’t want to realize—that images of the past give us ammo and a reason to co-create the world around us now, in real time, step by step, work in progress style.

This is a more fluid concept of reality, where instead of stepping into a ready-made “vibe” that some evil person might steal, YOU are the vibe, crafting the territory with every intentional creative action you take.

It’s not about success or failure with these creative actions. Only intention matters.

In fact, the fear of failure is what keeps people locked in the demand for perfection, like the poster above. It’s quite similar to Bryan Johnson’s “don’t die” ideology, where he sees man as some kind of oddity who no longer lives within the frames of history and time—precisely the units where action and creativity take place.

Without imperfection, there is only the monochrome palette of hubris.

Critical and forever dissatisfied, these kinds of “leaders” brew communities that play pretend.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition, but it can easily turn into utopian self-worship.

The desire to “fix” western metaphysics by longing for a perfect world—this must be let go if we are to resolve our pains.

It’s all about personal craft now. The intention to take action, flaws and all. Let’s wrap up with some final thoughts.

Your Craft Is Important

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When everything sounds the same, how will you stand out?

Will it be through some ideological message such as the above, laying the blame for the death of culture at the feet of some phantom hit man?

There are other ways to rise above.

It could feel like you're going back to the drawing board as you rely on muscle memory to kick in and get some groove back.

Impatience could spike too when you realize that, even with full power at your disposal, you'll be operating in a completely new reality.

To get your bearings, it may be fruitful to recommit to your craft.

Just like you're interdependent with other people, your relationship with your craft brings you into a 1-on-1 dynamic or dialogue, where one thing leads to another.

Avoid any thought-terminating cliches that will stop this trial and error process right in its tracks.

The desire to have a perfect system or use your craft to "fix" a problem may take you down rabbit holes of confusion, into the opium den of utopian ideologies.

You may be tempted to believe that aesthetics have been sucked from the world, leaving your creativity to only be used in instances of ideological longing.

You may start to believe that beauty only exists in static banners of group belonging, rather than kinetic rivers of hope, moment to moment.

It’s up to us to remove burdens of self-criticism and replace them with the will to act.

To act is to seek mastery through a marriage of practicality and fantasy.

Intentional effort, applied to one’s craft, is a pure virtue.

This is the virtue of the artisan—and his shadow is the mad scientist or the blackpill art critic who cannot find a dot of transcendence in the world, except in his grand scheme.

Applying oneself in the service of one's craft is precisely how we reach states of transcendence and avoid the feeling that beauty has escaped our current reality.

Going back to the drawing board, then, is an essential reminder that rebuilding the world overnight isn’t being asked of us.

The real ask is to visualize yourself as an artisan who has access to a blank page or an empty canvas—the greatest resource for any creator.

It's not so much that you're being pushed to remember WHAT you're good at, whether that's baking bread or trading stocks or leaving helpful text messages with loved ones.

The important thing is that as you pursue these things now, your duty is to avoid the cliches associated with old belief systems, like restaurants needing to look a certain way in order for you to feel like beauty exists in your community.

YOU are the pattern maker, and by showing devotion to your craft, movement becomes possible again.

Second nature turns on, and you turn dreams into reality.