The Joyous Struggle | Jonathan Rowson | Substack

These moments where one world-system is dying and another is being born are experienced emotionally - as loss, grief, dissonance, confusion, excitement; socially - as contention, struggle, polarisation; and spiritually - as a breakdown in encompassing narrative, meaning and purpose, and a longing for home.

It has become hard to be intentional about the future — to imagine and shape the worlds we want to live in — because the modern state rarely assumes any role in doing that or in encouraging us to do it either.

These future-making questions may not have solid answers, but we have responsibility to make intelligent guesses. Our role as a species is not just to inhabit the world but to reconstitute and reimagine it.

the world is changing fundamentally due to several major factors: the shift in geological time from Holocene to Anthropocene, the impact of the internet and smart phones on the infosphere and lifeworld, capitalism running out of viable frontiers and being a complex adaptive system that has lost its ability to adapt, widespread governance failures, ... See more

Changing the way we fundamentally perceive and experience reality requires seismic shifts in the collective imagination; the difficulty being that our systems of sense-making are deeply entrenched within us; separating ourselves from them is, by definition, existential. Developing our capacity to hold the fear that comes with this, sitting with it ... See more

I suggest we should begin with our experience of vitality, our capacity for love and with our attraction to beauty, and through them, see what kinds of worlds we might together imagine into being.

The biggest and most-discussed problems of our era — the current pandemic, climate change, political and ideological polarization, racial and income inequality, global supply chains, among others — can only be understood and engaged with as systems of interrelated phenomena and actions.

It took him forty years to formulate, but in the 1960s, Richardson finally found a model for this uncertainty; a paradox that neatly summarises the existential problem of computational thinking. While working on the ‘Statistics of Deadly Quarrels’, an early attempt at the scientific analysis of conflict, he set out to find a correlation between the

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