00 - viable pathways book-zine

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an introduction to this work:

the viable pathways book-zine is a research-in-development publication that covers a wide range of topics, exploring different media formats and design patterns for more nuanced understanding and effective learning.

fundamentally, it's an inquiry into post capitalist systems:

how can we create systems that enable us to conceive thrivable societies, coordinating and collaborating towards more regenerative and resilient presents & futures?

there is a myriad of different perspectives and research on the anthropocene, polycrisis or the metacrisis. and even where there's some agreement on the complex human predicament we're in, there is often divergence on what to do/how to move beyond it.

my research aimed to clarify: what are these different perspectives, how do they converge & diverge, and could they be complementary?

a few of my key findings were:

systemic change requires changes in all: superstructure, social structure, infrastructure and physiologic structure - see: holistic cultural materialism.
communism & socialism are not viable large-scale economic alternatives, since they still promote win-lose games. even though we could bind externalities at local/global levels, exponential rivalry continues, generating systemic collapse in the long term - see: generator functions of existential risk.
efforts at different levels of intervention are necessary: reducing immediate systemic harm (horizon 1), creating conditions for more desirable short/mid-term futures (horizon 2), developing new systems altogether (horizon 3) - see: three horizons, theories of change & design philosophies.

there were a plethora of references that informed these perspectives, which i'll dive into in the publication (see: references map - coming soon), but one question persisted throughout, which is:

amidst all of the complexity of ourselves and the world, where should i/we be most focused on?

john vervaeke points to this process of ongoing sensemaking and meaning-making as the process of recursive relevance realization, which starts to give us glimpses of a few answers in his awakening from the meaning crisis lectures.

but there are many other powerful perspectives. my attempt in this is to navigate through them and organize/reflect back in ways that are both practically orienting and challenging of deeper consideration.

a useful synthesis - though still a starting point - which i hope can support especially young people embarking on this journey of deep reflection and transformation, could be:

although maps can be very useful, there is no recipe. cultivating our own wisdom, nurturing our dharma and endeavoring to unfold our unique selves do seem like worthy pursuits. perhaps with a lot of sincere research and decentralized coordination we can clarify the nodes in the system where there's the most suffering and work to transform that, but ultimately, it goes beyond utilitarian optimization towards mitigating suffering. there's something beyond that, often unexplainable, about what each of us feel most called to be/do/become.

one big challenge though is that often we don't even know what challenges and possibilities exist - both inside of ourselves and out there in the world! the predominant systems in our societies are not designed for us to have this kind of visibility and collaboration. our local efforts can be very impactful and important, but as long our society has globalized risks and potentials, coordinating across the superorganism to find our place(s) in the whole must become not only a possibility, but a responsibility - hopefully for increasingly more of us.

it can take several years of trial and error, research and experimentation to find the communities, terms, perspectives that resonate and enrich our worldviews/ways of living - and even more time to find ways to make focusing on your part of the puzzle a viable financial possibility.

are there ways to make this journey less frustrating, isolating, tiresome and confusing?

i think so. and my first two steps were: 1) attempting to clarify what exists out there, and 2) attempting to challenge/strengthen my worldviews for coming up with a theory of change for my own expression in the world.

so that's what this book-zine is all about: mapping existing approaches/theories of change, consolidating my findings based on cold & warm data into a knowledge commons in more accessible and nuanced ways (which helps with elucidating possible developmental pathways/learning trails), and attempting to make sense of the complexity going on - clarifying important low-hanging fruits, leverage points & critical points of intervention.

the compilation you will find below - the viable pathways book-zine - is still a work in development, but it's already partly available and being constantly updated. in it, i share in a lot more detail everything i've found. but in case you've already resonated, below i describe the status/next steps of this work and how you can contribute to it if you'd like.

⚠ coming soon!

what you'll find below are some drafts of this publication. check back in a few weeks for (hopefully) more polished versions!

a note on where i'm going next:

before and throughout all of this research, i've held and developed long-time intuitions about the potential of games/serious play, networks and regenerative technology design as powerful & under-developed responses to the metacrisis.

i'll present several perspectives, references and prototypes that fundament my worldview and would love to further refine them to test/implement through the L1F3 projects.