Happy Canada Day everyone!
As promised, I will offer a taxonomy of the various contexts that are driving all of the meetups, communities, and friend groups in Toronto that excite me the most. These contexts play a crucial role in filtering and orienting my participation and interactions with others. If I attend a meetup or community with one or more of these contexts, I often find myself impressed with the quality of dialogue while connecting and relating with others in a deeper way that I did not think could be possible.
Without further ado...
CONTEXTS:
Systems & Culture Design
Authentic Relators
Inner Work / Psychotechnologies
Neo-Monasticism
Climate Action
Regen Web3
Impact Entrepreneurship
Existential Risk
Applied (Post?) Rationality
Discussions around existential risk, wisdom, intersubjectivity, and playing the Infinite Game are at the core of these enlivening Toronto meetups and existed prior to the pandemic through meetups and friend groups like Stoicism Toronto, Authentic Relating Toronto, and others. Once the pandemic happened, these in-person meetups were cancelled and found a home online. Thus, places like The Stoa and other adjacent spaces were born. These spaces participated in an emerging culture that is often referred to as The Liminal Web. Personally, I like to refer to it as a corner of the Internet where you can be unapologetically meta. While online had its drawbacks and limitations, it also contributed to an influx and amplification of new creatives and thinkers. The exciting part for me right now is witnessing people who found this material during the pandemic interacting with people who explored the material prior to the pandemic, shaping the discourse in novel and exhilarating ways. And through these interactions, people are beginning to realize that they have found their intellectual and spiritual home that they have been longing for. This is especially evident when I often hear people say, “I have found my people”. And whenever I hear that, I feel more inspired to honour that vibe and welcome more people into the fold who are also looking for that exact thing.
The intellectual and spiritual home I imagine at times has an acute sensitivity for vibes, both in sensing and creating. Vibes are all the rage these days and people are constantly looking for “good vibes”, whether it be through art, entertainment, spiritual events, etc. But I'm less interested in being around “vibe chasers” and more interested in being around people who are “vibe creators”, people who shape, experiment and play with different vibes. Dismissing these people for being too weird will be a big mistake as The Great Weirding continues to unfold. Perhaps, it is in being weird / being the fool in response to The Great Weirding may prove to be the most grounding. All vibes are indeed welcome! It definitely feels that the current moment is ripe for vibe creators to present themselves, offer their gift, and form life-changing relationships.
But then the question is, who would benefit from the vibe creators? The typical person who is attracted to these types of events and meetups tend to have high openness, extremely earnest, are charitable in conversations, and open to embracing complexity. One problem that keeps showing up with scenes is that they tend to get stale over time. This is mainly do to a lack of willingness to experiment because the safer option would be to ride the coattails of what is successful. But with the aforementioned openness among participants and having a scene actively support and encourage experimentation, the worries about things getting stale here are an exaggeration. A true home has this way of accepting difference and taking in people who felt that they didn't belong in other meetups and communities. They are free to articulate what was missing in their previous experiences, whether it's good vibes, intellectual rigour, etc. In fact, we do need people who are capable of jumping from community to community to offer a richer perspective on the meta-community that is forming around here.
A moment of tension that I do see from time to time, however, is that of defining the highest value is or what the grand meta-narrative will be. It seems not having a clean answer will definitely frustrate some people, especially those who want to have a movement that produces definitive impact in the world. In those moments, I like bringing up the word “ecology” because it's not about the One True Value that is spoken but rather many values in relation and co-creation with one another. I think the definition problem will solve itself when people truly engage in the process of knowing each other's values, experiences, and ways of perceiving the world. But whether you are motivated by the pursuit of truth, wisdom, regeneration, or systems change, how you express it with your words and actions matters just as much. I look forward to seeing projects in the Toronto scene getting more refined, but more importantly, come up with novel ways to synergize across projects in a way that doesn't compromise their individual uniqueness. I do not know what is going to happen, but the willingness to engage and the conviction in acting in service of the true, good, and the beautiful is there.
So here we are right now. It is summertime in 2023 and you have a bunch of people dying to meet each other, vibe, make connections, exchange ideas, geek about online content, enjoy the sun and touch some grass.
And that's how we go about building the intellectual and spiritual home that we've wanted all along...
Time to re-ground.
Upcoming Events in July
July 7-9: Sonic Springs Festival
July 8: Connection Lab: Dark Mode via Authentic Relating Toronto
July 15: Connection Lab: Dating Edition via Toronto Listening Experiments
July 15: Mindfulness FamJam and Nature Meditation Retreat via Consciousness Explorers Club
July 16: Forest Therapy Walk w/Emily Pleasance @ Evergreen Brickworks
July 17: Stoa In-Person Meetup @ Danu Social House
July 19: Sunset Meditation @ Trillium Park 8pm EST
July 26: ReFi Toronto meetup
July 28: Radical Aliveness meetup
July 28: ROM After Dark
Loving this post, and hope it's the first of many!