This past week or so has seen me settling into a new space, not quite knowing what it looks like, but starting to get closer. Feeling the old world as it passes away into a blur of vaccination mandates and passports, and the new world slowly forming. Like a photo negative as it sits in solution, the image becoming steadily clearer as the solution works its magic.
All the while, I’ve been listening to the audio book From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want.
It’s a good book because the central question is sound and provoking and scary all at once. “What if?” What if the world we could imagine could be brought to pass? What would that look like? Feel like? Sound like? In short, what would it be like to live the new world.
And so I start to peel back the layers to see what it might be.
For one, I believe this new world will live alongside the old. Indeed, both will move forward together. Alongside each other, with the spell of the old continuing to hold for some time, and only slowly being broken by the new. This painting below by Mark Henson captures it perfectly.
Or, perhaps the science fiction story Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. Again, people shake off the spell and walk away from the old world and into the new.
And since the old never simply concedes to the new, it will require quiet strength and determination. The strength and determination that stem from the depths of your soul, and reach towards the world you know can become.
The world I imagine is beautiful. It’s a world where humans live to their very fullest (rather than being constrained to what their employer requires). Where humans don’t just live in harmony with Gaia, but serve to heal the harm that has been, and continues to be, done.
Where people can throw off the shackles of governments and organise in a way that is free and unfettered, that does not permit of extraction or exploitation or colonisation or domination. A world not absent leaders, but rather filled with autonomous, self-sovereign humans who can lead themselves into their own truth. Where all are given the chance to live their truth. Where the abundance that already exists in the world is available to those who currently suffer without it.
It’s a world that is built using tools from crypto, tools that enables people to operate without the need for central intermediaries. To simply be, and be simple. Where people can follow their truth and be rewarded in meangful ways, where they do not need to be coerced by an employer, a society, a government.
These tools are vital. They have not been available until now, and they are desperately needed in this moment. This moment when the old world has shown its true face, its face of control and coercion, and when viable alternatives are so desperately needed.
For me, right now, the moment has come to plunge into creating the new. Creating it through joining, forming and building communities of interest. Of putting my shoulder to the wheel of the DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations). Of co-visioning through words and deeds.
I don’t like the old world that is showing itself faster and faster, but I am also learning that I do not need to be a part of it. I do not need to be a part of it, nor do I need to watch as it wraps its tentacles around others. For the tentacles are just smoke, and the fear just an emotion. And that is liberating as nothing else has been before. It’s liberating and it’s hard work, work true and soulful.
Who knows how this will end. I suspect it will end with the world realising that it can shake off the slumber that serves no-one, that no-one loves, including those who apparently benefit from it all. I also know that it won’t happen immediately - this process will a decade to be completed.
During that time, there will be troubles. There will be a need for difficult decisions, to step outside the old world and all of its comforts. In this sense, in this truest sense, the obstacle is the way. Go toward that which feels most difficult, and it is there that you shall find the way.
So my next steps are to rapidly learn the world of crypto. To find a band of like-minded souls in the DAO space who can co-create this world. To find like-minded souls in the real world who can bring it about on the ground. And to live as true to my version of truth, acknowledging that everyone has their own truth that deserves expression. Real truth, that does not come from fear or hurt or harm of others.
This has been a long time coming.
It is a good time to be alive.