michael-dean-k/

According to John Vervaeke, Gnosticism says that “the core of spirituality is not worship, but self-transcendence, healing and freeing people from existential entrapment of their suffering, and that our mythologies and practices should be in service of reuniting to who and what we are.”

There are a few key differences between Gnosticism and Christianity:

• It’s not about worship, but self-transcendence.
• It’s not centered around a single dogma, but around making stories and analogies that tap into the act of self-transcendence (and these analogies continue in movies).
• Mythology-wise, the Gods are not our superiors, but prison guards that trap us (and, like Christ, we each have a divine spark that lets us escape).

There's an important difference between "burn out" and "meaning drain." Burn out is a natural consequence of working hard on something. Even if I’m working crazy hours, as long as I’m in touch with the vision of the project, I’m resilient—I can reset with a day’s rest. Meaning drain is a bigger dilemma. Even with normal, or below average hours, a lack of purpose can poison your energy for months. Pointlessness is worse than exhaustion. This is why founders go to tremendous lengths to try and emotionally motivate their employees, but it can only be faked for so long. As a company grows, it becomes harder to scale meaning. For a solo project, your meaning-making lies in your head and in the conversations you have.

Toying with this idea of "the geometry of the meaning crisis." Maybe this abstract society-scale idea will make more sense through (8) visuals and patterns. Before I unpack each, here’s a sentence on what’s going on and how to fix it: Society used to provide rigid/objective packages of meaning; we found value in shedding them, but now we’re in a world where meaning is completely subjective, and we’re lost; so instead we need to understand the structures we dissolved, synthesize opposites, and not discard them, but transcend them. (What triggered this)

OLD WORLD OBJECTIVITY WAS BAD:

• Oppressive kings
• Male dominance & slavery
• No individuality at all
• Sexual repression
• No ability to build wealth
• Single world view
• Crammed in cities
• No autonomy of thought

BUT SUBJECTIVITY LED TO EXCESS & SCRAMBLING:

• Hierarchy flattening (decline in excellence)
• Duality dissolution (gender dysphoria)
• Downsampling (identity politics, psychographics)
• Hyper-salience (sexualization of everything)
• Hyper-commodification (influencer culture)
• Rationalization (death of religion)
• Disaggregation (isolation in the suburbs)
• Complete relativity of thought (conspiracy theories)

AND SO TO SOLVE THE MEANING CRISIS, WE NEED TO NOT ABANDON FORM, BUT TO RECONFIGURE AND TRANSCEND IT:

• Create your own journey in context of death
• Honor opposites & resolve paradoxes
• Defy labels & become 1 of 1
• Build attentional discipline & immunity to triggers
• Act with agency, honest income
• Pursue mystical experiences & altered states of consciousness
• Take responsibility to forge community
• Intentional evolution of your consciousness every week

From Bostrom's Deep Utopia:

• Learning over production
• Relationship over things
• Capital over labor

I think the leisure revolution will require people to come to their own decision about pleasure, experience, learning/skill development, goals, and community. Typically, external constraints decide and limit these factors. But in post-work material abundance, we might be forced into freedom, and that will make a lot of people uncomfortable.

Here's what AI says about the moral decay of the Roaring Twenties:

“The main moral decays of the “Roaring Twenties” included the widespread disregard for Prohibition laws, leading to a rise in organized crime, a loosening of sexual mores with the “flapper” culture, a growing emphasis on consumerism and materialism, and a perceived decline in traditional values like hard work and family stability, often seen as a clash between urban and rural morals, with the cities being viewed as more decadent.”

I’d guess this era was highly formative of the culture that emerged in Post WWII. To bring this into Strauss-Howe theory, similar to how the spiritual revolution phase II comes to maturity in IV, the decay in IV becomes the foundation of the next phase I.

When people talk about techno-accelerationism, they’re often talking about GDP or Moore’s law, but there’s barely consideration in the specific social fabric that might emerge. I also don’t think we have a theory of collective virtue formation in an open market.

So here’s why I think AI is going to take everyone’s job. There’s the classic and comforting belief that “humans’ adapt.” That’s been true. There’s been some technological breakthrough that makes an old class tools useless, and so a whole generation pivots to a new class of tools. But AI is an innovation in tool and worker. AI, when it gets cheap, commoditized, and agentic enough, will be a supply shock to the labor market.

This might happen in addition to unimaginable productivity and abundance (if not destruction), and many utopians are calling for a “post-scarcity world” where everyone gets UBI. This will be a techno-luxury marxism. We won’t have economic value, but we’ll get paid to exist? We won’t understand how the machinery of culture works. It’s the next frontier of infantilism, and our parents aren’t human.

This leads to a leisure revolution and simultaneous meaning crisis. No one will be able to “escape from freedom” anymore. We’ll look back at full-time jobs as a form of slavery, and yet also, be paralyzed by a fear of the infinite possibilities in our lives. Best case, the average middle class person has no other option but to learn to become an artist.

This is of course a cartoon vignette, but fuzzy futurism is useful to the degree that it gets you to adapt to the present. Maybe that won’t come true, but if you assumed it true, how would you act today, and does that actually serve you in today’s timeline?