What (the heck) is Metamodernism? ✨
An answer not for nerds 🤓
🤔 A friend asked me recently, “So, like, what actually is Metamodernism?”
I gave her a very unsatisfying answer.
Later that day, I searched online for a good article or video explanation of this term that I reference so often, and in many ways identify with.
What I found on the interwebs were, frankly, extremely nerdy. Often so philosophical that I even had trouble following.
So I decided to write my own damn answer to the question: What actually is Metamodernism?
Consider it a love letter to a movement, a prayer for who we can be, and a transmission of how Metamodernism currently lives in my body, mind, heart and soul.
Truthfully, I’m not too concerned about whether it fits other people’s definitions and understandings. The term is largely undefined in the general public, and so this is me going to battle for an articulation of Metamodernism that people can hopefully feel in their bones and dance in their heart-minds.
This is my own articulation of so many ideas, experiences, visions, and teachings that countless others have brought into my field. I will not be citing them one by one, but I do owe what I’m saying below to the amazing beings (many of whom I’m proud to call friends) who are living (and dead) embodied examples of our Metamodern potential.
🤖 Why ‘Modernism?
I’ve been asked before: why use a term that has the word “modernism” in it? Aren’t we trying to evolve beyond that worldview? Yes. It’s not an ideal association.
It’s also perhaps unrealistic to think we can just float away far, far beyond Modernism into a new way of being that completely leaves behind our overwhelmingly predominant societal and psychological structures. By embracing “Metamodernism,” I am in a way acknowledging that Modernism is here to stay, likely for the rest of my lifetime, and that what we create can and must build from the blessings and the curses of our current times.
Also, I’m an artist! As an art school grad, and I have an appetite for pretentious terms that artists coin ;-) Metamodernism, like Postmodernism, initially came into the collective psyche to describe a new paradigm of artistic views on reality.
In that spirit, let’s see all of our “culture building” as art, which is one of the core tenants that I advocate for below (how convenient)!
🔮 So, my friend, what actually is Metamodernism and the qualities of the culture it births?
Well, Metamodernism is…
🦋 Post-Tragic
This, for me, is the core of it all. Post-Tragic, as I experience it, is the recognition that life is death, and death is life. It’s the embodied knowing that suffering can simultaneously be our greatest blessing and a horror we need to face with our fully open hearts.
Post-Tragic doesn’t mean that we no longer suffer, rather that we accept suffering, if not as a guiding gift of love, at the very least, as simply What Is. It’s here, now, when it is, and it’s not when it’s not. Everything is ephemeral and open, and this too shall pass. And part of why it will pass is because we, individually and collectively, can be the embodied agents of action who imperfectly move towards right alignment to create a more beautiful world, fully feeling the fullness of life each step of the way.
👁️ Wholeness
A view oriented from Wholeness means that we can see everything as God. Including darkness, forgetting, separation, boundaries, purple carrots and used car tires. Everything. Everything is God, including the view that nothing is God.
What this view awakens, when embodied, is a sacred ground that recognizes every moment as a ceremony called life. There is nowhere to get to, because we’re already fundamentally home. And yet, there is everywhere to explore, because everywhere is home.
So how do we know where to go? We listen to the eros of soul and trust each moment as an unfolding intelligence that is good, even when it’s experientially bad. This isn’t a bypassing of what is rather a direct intimacy with exactly What Is, which is Wholeness, already here and always becoming more of itself.
🔥 Erotic AF
Yeah, you heard me. Metamodernism is erotic as fuck. A Metamodern view is one that sees all of life as making love to itself, for itself - which includes you! Every moment is the interpenetration of all that is with its own Source, as timeless, boundless awareness. Polarities, dualities, contrasts, uniqueness - all of it arises from and as the One-as-many, with a life-force that is orgasmic in nature, big banging our lives into reality.
Metamodernism, with its developmental view, can see all of evolution trajectorying itself all over the canvas of kosmos, like a holy art project that never ends yet is always dying in order to rebirth itself as new potential. If you’re not at least a little turned on by this, then you’re probs not Metamodern ;-)
🐝 Post-Liberal
A Metamodern society is a Post-Liberal one. Liberalism was born from modernism. Postmodernism is what kills Liberalism by paradoxically pushing it to its extreme. Patriotically Progressive Post-Liberalism is what Metamodernism births.
This means that our institutions become protectors of communities - of the commons, which are as diversely cohered as the humans forming them. Post-Liberalism shifts much of our collective decision making as locally as pragmatic, prioritizing intimacy and integrated uniqueness over platitudes of ideology blanketed across billions of humans without any meaningful room for differentiation and social experimentation.
Post-Liberalism can unleash a creativity that will allow for prototyping systems of social cohesion not as an attempt to reach some final form rather as a way of life that is adaptive to the needs and desires of the humans it's serving. These experiments will be networked, ensuring wisdom sharing is built-in and part of our tithing service to our nation and planet. We will become patriotic bees pollinating possibilities of collective evolutionary potential as a shared celebration of a Post-Liberal freedom that, ironically, Liberalism can never know.
💪 R/evolutionary
Metamodernism goes to battle to protect that which is sacred so that we can birth and be birthed by the womb of our potential. This isn’t all just love and light. Our time-between-worlds is calling forth a revolution of evolution, a turning of the wheel towards goodness, truth and beauty in an age of collapsing open. Cacao ceremonies and AI breakthroughs alone won’t cut it, but they could be a great start! Yes/and we must show up to life, fully living into our purpose as the passion of soul demanding to be embodied, not just as anything, but as your uniqueness. Only you can be you. When you say yes to you, in service to life, that, my friend, is a r/evolutionary act.
🌚 Relational Soulmaking
Life is a real dream. We can dream this reality in many ways. Metamodern alchemy is the practice of dreaming awake, together, as imaginal beings receiving and sharing multidimensional wholeness which is paradoxically universally unique to each being while part of a larger mosaic that is regenerating dreams into reality. Metamodern alchemy is about literally creating life, as life, with life, for life.
Soulmaking is a lifestyle as much as it is a practice. It’s a way of being reality by imagining ourselves as imaginal selves. When hacked, it’s a cheat code to God. (Try it and find out.)
🎨 Life Art
Metamodernism is the remembrance that art is a frame of mind as much as it is a frame of pictures. What if every unfolding moment is God’s masterpiece and humanity’s work in progress? What if every relationship is an intimate gesture of potential on the canvas of creation, discovering itself as its own mystery in the making? What if we can learn to see beauty in all things while also sensing the depth of artistry that some forms call forth in us, as awe, or disturbance, or disturbingly awe-full?
Can we dare to be wonderstruckly open to new potentials, like creative caretakers of Mystery’s magic? Art not just as a process of creation but a Creation process in which life reveals more of its beauty paradoxically by dying to what no longer serves, like waves of watercolors washing away into the timeless song of silence...
❤️🔥 Galaxy HeartMinds
Metamodernism is about sacred rationality that pours through the heart, into and as love. This looks like care, compassion and curiosity. Our best ideas are because the heart feels them as true, sees them as beautiful and knows them in our bones as good. Our intelligence dares to be heart-homed, body-infused, soul-channelled, relationally-attuned, and earth-aligned. This makes the mind stronger because it’s integrated into the fullness of sensorial, intuitive and non-conceptual knowing. We become one coherent system while recognizing each of our unique capacities and constitutions create a gorgeously rich diversity that is as essential (and in fact a part of) our integrated wholeness.
⚡ Sourcekeepers
Metamodernists see collectives as individuals and individuals as collectives, all co-creating each other as evolving expressions of awakening wholeness. We embrace pluralism, including the pluralism of exclusivity, because it’s backed by unity’s effort-full embrace. Diversity exists so that we can each see more of ourselves in one another, as one another, showing up to unfolding each other home.
When we source life, we become keepers of soul. Soul is only soulful because it’s universally uniquely erotic, like the dance of a thousand goosebumps when jazz musicians harmonize between holy and human. That feeling when nowhere else in the cosmos exists except here & now, at home in heaven’s forgetting & remembering.
Soul is a symphony, and we keep showing up because we are addicted, perhaps even enslaved, to its river-like rhythm, winding us through the jungle of life with grace and determination.
👽 Meta-Integral-Shamanic
Meta: the ability to be consciously self-and-other-and-Self aware in-the-moment, holding what is with self-referential meta-awareness. And then the ability to go meta on that, and to go meta on that, and to go meta on that…revealing the empty-full nature of our constructed views of reality.
Integral: the capacity to intentionally move between, in, and as multiple worldviews and developmental expressions across multiple domains with seriously playful intimate integrity.
Shamanic: the intimate contact with and as reality’s multi-dimensional realms of existence — and the beings who reside there (both seen and unseen) — for the purpose of integrating wisdom, insights and potentials into our human and planetary systems. And/or to humbly explore, honor and apprentice to the wild, weird, wondrous, whimsical and wizardly windows of Mystery’s imaginal infinity.
🌊 Lighthouse
Metamodernism is a lighthouse for our emerging culture.
Grounded to Earth. Stretching to immanent heavens. Beaming out from the heart. Illuminating the light of darkness while revealing the darkness of light. Guiding steadily during storms. A beacon for lost souls. A sanctuary in the sea of life. A seer of the unseen. A siren for transformation. A keeper of the traditions. And a wayfinder of the future.
We are the keepers of Metamodernism, and our home is the lighthouse of unfolding Wholeness. This essay is a fractal of our light, transmitting time into evolutionary motion like currents of care caressing oceans of potential, already arrived and always on a journey.
🙌 Mission Accomplished-ish
Okay, I admit, this is probably still nerdy as shit. My friend likely remains thoroughly confused. Maybe I am, too? Oh well, I did my best :)
But wait, there’s more!
If you desire a more conventional definition for Metamodernism, I guess I would say…
The current mythos of Metamodernism is that goodness, truth and beauty exist, both inherently and as evolving expressions of Wholeness. And that we can be in relationship with them - as them - designing, creating and embodying systems, cultures and collectives that practice, play and pray these values into being - as offerings of care, in service to Life.
Now we’re talking!
♥️ Thanks for reading and feel free to share, add, pushback or embellish this madness with your own soulful care :)
Check out my podcast Illuminating Life for deep dives with Metamodern leaders.
To learn more about the Metamodern collectives I’ve been co-creating and stewarding, see the video presentation below.
You can also explore my community projects at: tuckerlighthouse.com
Amen to this! And one among many lines that stood out “Soul is a symphony, and we keep showing up because we are addicted, perhaps even enslaved, to its river-like rhythm, winding us through the jungle of life with grace and determination.”
Well done