The Joyous Struggle
Newsletter (Digital)
The Joyous Struggle does what it says on the tin - it struggles, with joy. I struggle to make sense of conundrums, challenges, crises, the relationship between them, and our relationship to all that, which as a shorthand we call ‘the metacrisis’. I define the metacrisis as follows:
The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.
In this context of metacrisis, the joy comes from exploring ‘newfound feelings and impossible ideas’ by which I really mean whatever comes to heart and mind. Some of the posts are very personal, some more conceptual, and many are about our lived experience of this period of history, where we appear to be called upon to pay attention in new ways and bring new forms of perspective and action into being. This is my personal site, but I do often write about themes that are relevant to Perspectiva, the organisation I lead as my day job.
(*Disclaimer* I am a chess Grandmaster and former British Chess Champion, but I am more or less retired, and very rarely write about chess at any length, so please do subscribe if you’re interested in what ‘life after chess’ can look like, but not if you are looking for advice on opening theory.)
Some posts are crafted to read well, but are more about thinking out loud, and therefore rougher around the edges, but hopefully still a joy to struggle with…
I typically write one post a week, which should usually take about ten minutes to read. I also do a weekly audio post for paid subscribers.
(To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.) Source
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