New Year, New Vibe

Welcome to the age of agency

Write & Lift is an ethos of personal and spiritual development through conscious physical exertion and practice of the writing craft. Through this effort to strengthen our bodies and minds, we become anti-fragile and self-respecting sovereign individuals. Through this effort, we may stand against untruth and evil and create a new culture of vitality, strength, and virtue.

New Year, New Vibe

I’m always hesitant to ascribe big plans to the new year. Partially, this is done to avoid setting myself up for failure. The first day of the year is like any other day, right? There is no retrospective of the past two years I’ve been growing this newsletter or a tedious list of “lessons.” Think of it as a desire to put into words the spiritual fork in the road we’re all approaching—the “vibe shift” taking place.

You can all feel it in some way. But this goes beyond politics, culture, and technology. I am filled with a clear and recognizable sense of optimism. Though I can’t be sure, I imagine a similar sense of “beginning” filled the streets, churches, and shops during the early days of the Renaissance and the post-WWII economic boom of the 1950s. The world feels very much “for the taking,” and I don’t think it’s a mirage.

Bending History

What makes this moment special is that we all have the ability to bend the arc of history. Even those who are geographically and socially isolated have the tools and means to express their voices in the world.

Besides the obvious (family and health), we take this for granted more than anything else. What will continue to define next year and the years forthcoming is you. The world has opened up. We have the right to concern ourselves with institutional decay and corruption. Still, we should never forget that the individual has never had the agency to create their reality like they do now. We can choose to silo ourselves into the archaic and broken boxes built by our ancestors and destroyed by malevolence, or we can assert our power over the world through deliberate individual action.

But this requires conscious effort. It requires a mind and system of morality conscious of its desire to become easily distracted. You must win this game if you want to take advantage of this time. The only gatekeeper is you.

It’s easy to become fixated on our time's social, political, and moral problems. And we should make an effort to stay informed and aware. You can’t seek an alternative if you aren’t aware of what you’re avoiding. But hitting a home run requires stepping up to the plate. It requires a willingness to fail. I’ve written a lot about how human nature so easily distorts goodness and truth for the sake of the group or status. Expect this to continue—in some regard—in 2025. Though I’ve come to the late realization that we’re all, for the most part, conscious of these problems. What we need is an alternate path. We need the map, but we also need the tools to traverse the territory.

The Age of Agency

The theme of next year (and that of the coming age) is personal agency: in business, in education, in health, and matters of the spirit. You—the individual—are responsible for the outcomes of your life, and you have more leverage than ever before.

It is not enough to be told what to learn or think; we must become completely aware of how we learn and think. We cannot accept that “job training” will provide us with a lifelong career. We will be many things, and we will become comfortable reinventing ourselves.

In 2025, the individual will become a scientist, philosopher, and teacher out of necessity. Self-experimentation and self-education will replace “expert” modalities. The niche corners of the internet will continue to amass interesting and thought-provoking voices, shining a lot on inconvenient truths and shattering destructive dogmas. The religious man—grounded in faith and compelled to a higher vision—will replace the sniveling and ineffectual “man of reason” as the paragon of societal change and structure. We will let old wisdom guide us, and new technology shape our day-to-day lives.

But again, none of this will happen to you if you cannot break free of the dopamine trap or sort the wheat from the chaff. This is your task—my task—for the new year. What is worth focusing on? What is worth studying, reading, and listening to? And, of most importance, what is worth ignoring? Is this rabbit hole going to help me to lay a brick today for a better future.

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Thank you for supporting my writing. I’m eternally grateful. Take the next days to recharge and rest. There is a hell of a lot of work to do.

-Joe