⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

❤️ Communication is Sacred: Why change happens in the spaces between us. Read it here.

👁 A Dozen Ways To Live Real Good: Twelve practices to produce positive shifts in the way you feel about your life. Read them here.

🔗 Duuo - A Creator Matchmaking Experiment: submit an application to get matched with someone likeminded. if you hit it off, do something cool. write an essay, launch a podcast, shoot a documentary, build a product together — whatever you want. Try it here.

⚡️ Plus a bonus bolt at the bottom of this email. ⬇️

🎇 Image of The Week

This image depicts the otherworldly rainbow eucalyptus trees shed their bark at different times, revealing a bright green layer underneath, which then matures to give blue, purple, orange, and maroon hues, making the trunks look like they've been painted.

🗝 Elders and Exemplars

I was reflecting on celebrity worship and the fixation so many have on "influencers" in today's world.

There are so many waiting and watching for them to mess up so they can chatter about the drama.

It should not be a surprise that anyone with a large following acts in ways to upset large swathes of people.

This isn't to say having a large following inherently makes you a bad person. It's just that followers are attracted through polarization.

These figures are lightning rods for controversy. Their audiences grow through agitation. This might be deliberate or unconscious.

The point here is that people look to cultural icons as if they are meant to be figures of moral purity and guidance.

They are not that. They never have been.

They are entertainers.

The everlasting drip of drama is latched onto as a form of digital opium.

It's a way of distracting ourselves from the stressors and pains present in our lives.

That's fine. I'm just trying to clear up a confusion.

Don't be shocked that the boat gets rocked. Don't clutch your pearls that people with large audiences express abhorrent opinions. It's that way by design.

Opinions with no shock factor don't captivate attention in the same way. We all know this intuitively but it's easy to get swept up in the scrum and lost in the tension of us vs. them.

Some people expect to gather elder wisdom and moral examples from the digital platforms we travel through on the winding roads of the internet.

I feel we've become disconnected from the grounded reality around us.

The people in your 3D offscreen life are meant to be the source of this kind of wisdom where it can be held in flesh and blood relationships with a shared context.

I'd much prefer we treat our grandmothers and grandfathers as the portal to insight than the never-ending social media buffoonery and over-the-top moral grandstanding.

Learn from the example of people with a vested interest in us. Not necessarily about how the world SHOULD be but to understand what they regret and what really matters to them.

There is a lack of focus on gathering personal perspectives informed by years of living. There's something clarifying about a long life. A lot of the captivating BS can fade away the closer we get to the end so that the heart of the matter can really shine through.

I'd love to see the reinvigoration of elderhood within our culture.

The path to get there? It's unclear from where I sit. But pointing it out seems like a good first step. I'll listen and watch how this seed grows over time. Maybe you have some thoughts on it?

🏢 Of The Empire

Ponder this biting reflection from the soul of Mary Oliver:

"We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness."

🤓 Learn This Word

Narraform: To instrumentally deploy and cross-link narratives with the intent to alter the phenomenological landscape within which new information is received, made sense of, and acted upon. "Politics used to be about object-level events, but these days it's all narraforming."

H/T Matthew Pirkowski

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Make Your Soul Grow: 84-Year-Old Kurt Vonnegut’s Wonderful Letter to a Group of High School Students

In 2006, a group of students at Xavier High School in New York City were given an interesting assignment: to write their favorite authors and try to persuade them to visit the school.

Five students opted to write to none other than Kurt Vonnegut, the inimitable author of numerous hilarious, mind-bending, darkly satirical sci-fi classics such as Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle.

Wily ol’ Kurt was the only author to reply to the high school students. Although he opted not to visit the school — noting that he no longer makes public appearances because he “now resemble[s] nothing so much as an iguana” — he did take the time to write the students a marvelous letter.

​[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

P.S. Here’s the ⚡️ bonus bolt: Mesmerizing and otherworldly animal ear flicks. Watch it here.