The Beginning
A New Beginning in 2021
This is the tenth issue of Twentitude, as good a time as any to announce changes in this newsletter.
In short: Twentitude will slow down in the future - slower in frequency and slower in its mood. It will be sent every other week instead of a weekly newsletter. It's also going to consciously adopt the principle of 'slow thought at fast speed,' of carefully building the capacities we need to thrive in the 2020s and to transform the world while doing so.
The question is: how?
Ideas
Slow Thought: A Manifesto
We need a philosophy of Slow Thought to ease thinking into a more playful and porous dialogue about what it means to live.
Highlight
Buddha, Socrates and Lao-Tzu
About twenty hundred years ago, influential thinkers and traditions arose independently in India, Greece and China. It's often called the Axial age. The Buddha, Socratus (or Plato) and Lao-Tzu were among the Axial age individuals whose ideas and ideals have determined the course of human history ever since.
Their idea of 'humanness' is still the template for billions.
The Axial inspiration has run its course. We have to overturn (or at least transform) the insights of the Axial age to thrive in the Anthropocene, but the only way we can do so is by returning to their ideas, meditating upon them, absorbing what we need and setting the rest aside.
Even better: we can read them together and use each one to throw light upon the other two.
