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Escape Velocity Training 2022
Millennials have been born into a disastrous era – sort of like Neo in the Matrix. Their notoriously unfortunate inheritance (including climate change, global corporate capitalism, environmental collapse, fiscal austerity) has become a dark meme in common knowledge.
But that incomprehensibly epic drama at the macro level is compounded by an immense challenge at the micro level of personal human experience for each so-called Millennial. This basic challenge is experienced also by everyone who has become marginalized by today’s economic system.
The main practical problem for Millennial-aged people today is an economic status quo that relishes exploitative work and employment, instead of an economy based upon authentic Livelihood for every citizen.
Our individual challenge to achieve Livelihood is actually primary. It is necessary to master this challenge in order for anyone to be of any help in the macro problems vexing humanity and Earth now, during the Anthropocene.
Specifically, it is of primary importance, and one’s priority (especially a Millennial-aged person), to liberate oneself from the economic poverty trap and to rise out of survival mode. Fortunately, this individual challenge is more comprehensible than the looming macro problems facing Humanity and Earth – so one’s unique human challenge is precisely our first order of business.
Purpose and Work
Over time, purpose has been ripped apart from its home in our work. In this training, right away we reunite these two, work and purpose, purpose and work. We will return to this idea over and over, most intentionally.
Our meaning of following one’s Livelihood combines a person’s true craft with receiving income from sharing it with others. — In other words, it is the person’s destiny plus rewards for offering that back to humanity.
Understanding deeply the concept of Livelihood – hopefully already familiar to you, but if not then here’s a preliminary definition – is the meta-goal of this training. The transcendence intrinsic to Livelihood, however, requires full lucidity and realism about exactly what is being abandoned.
In order to arrive in Livelihood, one must gain ‘escape velocity’ from whatever binds oneself and holds one down (like the artificial gravity of poverty, or mediocrity).
If you want to understand your own authentic, unique Livelihood, and abandon the constraints that have held you back so far, then it’s no wonder you’ve chosen to check out the alternative perspectives of this Training.
About the Escape Velocity 2020 Training
The Escape Velocity program is designed to make points directly, and to produce deep impressions without delay, and therefore, not to require too many days and hours to undergo. We’re not going to dilly-dally or beat around the bush here.
Therefore, as a way of kicking off your Training, let’s confront right away, now, this core issue of the particularly harmful socio-cultural phenomenon that we will call being held back.
We can, overall, get held back in a variety of ways, by a particular person or a localized situation, or, by an entire society, by all of humanity, or even by history itself.
Since that vast phenomenon of being held back deserves thorough investigation, for now we’re laser-focusing upon this aspect: how it can feel to get held back, fundamentally. Everybody will have a unique story and tales, but a certain kind of existential distress will be felt commonly. It will be useful to face this and move through it.
Our electro-chemical responses to this existential distress obviously vary widely, and yet we can still talk about the basic forms: fear, confusion, doubt, pessimism, malaise, apathy, despair, anger, hopelessness, fantasy-prone escapism. (Sometimes we enter such states without awareness of them.)
Thus it is crucial for each of us, as soon as possible, to become acquainted with our own particular emotional complex of experiencing the phenomenon of being held back (in whichever circumstances it occurs most for you, regardless of whether you are rich or poor).
Yet we must do this not necessarily for its own sake, and certainly not to get captivated by a ‘world of pain’ at this point – but rather, in order to move through and beyond being held back toward the more important business of being able to thrive.
True, it is necessary to move through this negative complex as soon as possible and transcend it forever; but for now, be patient with yourself as it unravels and unfolds, under your more probing gaze.
Acknowledge being held back now, despite your feelings, in order to allow yourself to experience more compassionate, wider vision later on about this vexing social phenomenon.
(Sport and exercise will be useful for dealing with this emotional dimension, especially any negative emotions that could come up, which we’ll touch upon tomorrow.)
Preview and Your Start
Let’s take our first steps with some key points from tomorrow’s Day 01 of the Training, called Sorting Out Your Game:
- your Game is the mental, physical, domestic scenarios of your life
- become focused by reducing distractions (especially the bodily kind)
- gain in existential confidence, human power, creativity, wealth
The Philosophical Intelligence Agency 