Metacrisis Journey Day 1: Quitting Jobbing, Starting Questing
Quitting traditional work, Stepping into the adventure
I find often that the threads of my interests, activities and communities will seem divergent and unrelated — then every 7 years or so they kaleidoscope together in a symphony of synchronicity, a synapse-sizzling tapestry that couldn’t be seen until it formed.
And that journey isn’t circular, it’s spiral, with each cycle picking up on themes from the previous ones, but taking them in new directions.
At 49, perhaps I’m having my first meta-cycle, a 7 * 7 reorientation in my thinking, work, and life.
All that’s to say I’ve quit my job. Or Jobs. Or rather — I’ve quit “jobbing”. And started Questing.
The last 5 years working with the amazing team at the University of British Columbia’s Emerging Media Lab and more recently the nascent Digital Experience Lab has been transformative. Saeed Dyanatkar has fostered a truly unique community of faculty and long-term staff as well as student staff, volunteers and enthusiasts that prototypes and MVPs its way through uncharted waters of VR, AR, AI and other emerging media in an open lab, always aimed at serving the world through innovative teaching & learning and research. Especially important has been the learning around Agile process — prototyping, experimenting, learning, iterating.
It’s been a thrilling, growthful adventure I’m proud of. And as of Sep 1st, I’ve stepped back from my staff position.
On the Industry side, 5 years of industry work in VR, AR and Haptics, has been engaging, built some great community, and taught me a tremendous amount about on the one hand bringing people together across disciplines, and on the other delivering on ambitious projects in ludicrous timelines.
While I’m not leaving either of those domains entirely, I’ve stepped back to spend the next 6 months in a dedicated exploration of the Metacrisis.
Thaumazo and The Metacrisis
My friends in the ParTecK community (a group exploring and working in the liminal spaces bordering technology, wisdom, ethics and consciousness) introduced me to the work of Daniel Schmactenberger
I find his work resonates with Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path — a Magnum Opus on the crises facing humanity, their underlying causes and how to navigate through them. Schmactenberger explores the threats, crises and erosions to thriving on Earth we’re experiencing in a range of areas ranging from governance to trust to climate change to cultural fragmentation. He works hard to convey to as many people as possible both the extreme urgency of Humanity seeing, recognizing, and getting serious about facing these challenges head on.
My engagement with the people taking this most seriously and working most deeply on it has been life changing, and aligns marvelously with the third work strand that’s been in my life these past several years: Thaumazo. Thaumazo is a nonprofit formed by a trio of friends from back in the U-Hill highschool days: Myself, Ken Spencer and Melanda Ochieng. We committed to working together to create an organization that would let us work in ways that brought us joy on issues we felt were important with people that we love, respect, and in doing so create a new way of living our Callings. With human connection at its core, and a deeply emergent approach, we build relationships first, then from there surface opportunities for positive impact. I call the process Mycelial, inspired by the extraordinary fungal networks that interconnect entire forests but more on that in other writings.
A Mycelial Fellowship
I was humbled and moved when one of our key supporters recently provided me the opportunity to create a 6 month Fellowship, applying this “mycelial” approach to collaborative, emergent work to the Metacrisis. For a few months I’ve been preparing, tying up loose ends, and setting the stage.
Today was Day 1. Filled with a combination of research, conversations, project planning, and setting up an instance of Thaumazo’s “Community Mycelium”, a tool to help people sense into and organize collaboration.
Also calls about VR, Haptics … as I said, each cycle brings with it the themes from previous ones, and the extraordinary people I’ve been fortunate to interact with.
Between now and mid-March, I’ll be sharing with you some of those people and our conversations, and inviting you to participate. To the extent I can, I’ll be sharing the tools I use, the transcripts and videos of calls, the resources I find, create, and use to help me understand as deeply as I can the Metacrisis, what it will take for us as a species to move through it, what might be on the other side, and how I can best participate in the collective Human effort to create better thriving.
If this journey resonates with you, I encourage you to reach out and share your own journey and experiences — perhaps we’ll learn from each other, collaborate, or inspire one another’s work.
(A note: I use AI extensively in my own research, technological infrastructure, and work. But the words I write here are my own, and the images I include are creative commons images made by humans. I think Generative AI is an extremely important tool that can help us, but both the technology and the way it’s used to exploit and displace our humanity are deeply problematic. Whenever I share work AI was directly involved in, I’ll mark it as such)