The Next Act for the Spiritual Internet
There was a worthwhile online spirituality scene during the High Pandemic full of formerly comfortable people learning about how to be okay moment to moment. As they have regained their comfort, it hasn’t transitioned gracefully into redistributing their newfound capacity.
But what it did do is draw together a bunch of dedicated practitioners — “service providers,” I have sometimes half-jokingly called them — who had the capacity to facilitate that transition, and it still feels like very early innings of the impact of that part of the scene.
If I could call in a next act for online spirituality scenes, it would be about deploying capacity for the planning for and processing of hard regenerative work that is plainly before us right now, finding ways to plug in and stay in without burning out.
As far as the day-to-day posting goes, I would expect this to look a lot less like descriptions of techniques and effects in isolation and a lot more like scenes from everyday life and how they are navigated.
A considerable amount of this work takes place on levels that appear trivial and superficial — and that’s good, actually — but I see heartening indications that people are taking this moment of uncertainty on trivial platforms to build more meaningful ones.
The most interesting point of friction I anticipate with the incentives of social media and the scenes that have formed there is that there’s no construction of personal success or fame or gain or profit that jives with the virtues of this, only recognition for centering others.
I find it really striking to compare where we’re at now to the early months of 2021, where there was this profusion of online accounts popping up amidst possibly the worst civilizational paralysis of our lifetimes going, “I am literally a buddha, and actually this is fine.”
That was where it started to sour, for me, from the beautiful campfire huddle of late 2020, and turn into some kind of gold rush.
I hope we’ve seen the peak of that, for this go-round.
