2024 was a tremendously good year for me.
I had some adventures, fell in love, finished a major project, span up a stoke-centric business system, discovered an amazing new state, and deepened relationships with friends old and new.
Come to think of it, every year since 2020 has been better than the one prior. To a certain extent this is luck - no tragedies or disasters out of my control have befallen me - but to a much greater extend this trend is due to the decision I made in January 2020 to begin pursuing post-consumer praxis.
I need to come up with a better term for it. There’s no punch at all to ‘post-consumer praxis’. It’s what you get when you mash together anti-consumerism, voluntary simplicity, minimalism, an earth-centric ethics, DIY culture, polymathic approach to knowledge acquisition, metacrisis awareness, systems thinking, a dash of personal finance and FIRE techniques, the relentless pursuit of self-understanding, and roll it all up into one bundle.
At any rate, when I first stumbled across this difficult-to-articulate bundle, I knew instantly it’s what I’d been looking for and I went all in on it.
It wasn’t an overnight process. My education is still very much in progress. But every step along the way has been moving my life in closer alignment with my vision and values: stress is down, stoke is up; misfortunes are fewer and further in between, and serendipitous goodness interjects itself into my plans with suspicious frequency.
The trend is clear to me, as is the proper causal attribution. This is what’s supposed to happen, these are the promised results of effort invested, and my experience has been an affirmation.
I write this not to brag. You have to reason to care that some random internet guy is having a great half-decade. The point of me writing this is to convey that there exists a set of practices and understandings that have caused this positive trend in life experience, a set of practices that are learnable, that can be adopted and adapted to your specific life circumstances just the same way I customized these practices for my own unique self.
I’d be mad if someone knew about this stuff and just sat on their knowledge, smugly enjoying their great life without at least dropping a clue or two how they pulled it off. Indeed, I’m upset that it took me till 2020 to find this knowledge. It’s not like I wasn’t looking for it!
My dissatisfaction with how widespread knowledge of these practices are is why I wrote Deep Response, my first attempt to publish my take on post-consumerism.
And it’s why I’ll keep writing about it, because I’ve only just begun. It’s clear to me that I’ve only just cracked the seal on this thing, I’ve only just barely got my head wrapped around the implications of where these practices can take us. The potential is, I sense, huge.
I am not, in other words, entering a cruise phase. Nothing excites me more than knowing there’s a vast unexplored territory in front of me. My intent is to keep going, and to keep documenting the journey, to take notes and share them with you.
Thanks for following along. Here’s to another year of exploration.