Not long ago, I decided to reorient my life for meaning. I didn’t stop being a writer just because I hadn’t published in a while. In fact, I’m still working on my book, next steps for Kimiya, and learning what’s really worth writing about. I believe that to stay alive, I needed to live inside my passion and purpose, rather than just talk about them on the internet. I’m still as lost as ever, though, and that’s okay.
Stories and spaces, in this way, become seeds that grow into a more beautiful life. That is, a life where beauty is seen in the wondrous experiences of the surreal, the awe-inspiring, the creative ways the world unfolds around us. The experiences I’ve encountered over the past 6 months have been so enriching that I haven’t yet had a true starting point to express them all.
The good news is that this new way of seeing has broadened my perspective on possibilities for coordinating meaning, individual and collective purpose-making in an agentic and intelligence-first world. It’s also allowed me the clarity to continue this next phase of re-searching.
🌞 I have been accepted into Octant Epoch 9, the current round for Ethereum storytellers recognizing past and future efforts. Supported by Octant and the Ethereum Foundation, 30 applicants have been selected from nearly 500. This is a pretty big deal for me, and I would love your support! Read more about my proposal and application at octante9.kimiyamag.com and read more about all 30 winners at https://octant.app/projects
I’m told it’s something like “living my best life”.
Making new friends here in Vietnam has actually been much easier than expected, and after getting to know so many locals, now I understand why. Friendship and mutual sharing are just baked into culture. Every day of the week is filled with some kind of activity, from yoga and meditation to nature hikes and coffee dates. Around 35-40 locals and travelers alike gather every Saturday morning to celebrate new connections. We learn from one another, share stories about our lives, and experience the beauty of this lively, yet slower-paced city together. This is the beginning stages of how a community shows, not just through zero-sum transactional means, to build spaces for meaning in real time.
I thought I would begin by telling a few stories I’ve gathered, give some insight into what I’ve been researching, and its purpose.
Naturally, I am asked some form of this question each week.
I have multiple answers depending on how closely I’ve gotten to know someone. In my last update, I had only a small idea about why I began exploring, and upon integrating the experiences I had a year prior in the US, I’m now starting to form a clearer understanding.
If I don’t really know you, I’ll probably say something like:
“I’m here to explore the culture and be close to nature every day. I like it here!” or “I’m a writer and I’m doing some research on what gives people purpose.”
Even when I say I’m here to learn, which is true, some will think I’m joking or wonder why I chose to “learn” here in Vietnam, of all places.
The other reason I might give has a deeper meaning connected to a vision I once had.
My friends who attend weekly group meditation in Da Lat know that I tend to experience visions during deep meditation. I’ve had multiple meaningful visions across my life, but none so vivid as the one that led me here.
In this vision, I was taken back to what could only be explained at the time as a past life in order to experience the deep sadness of a small child crying in a darkened jail cell. It makes sense now, seeing as how I had sort of locked myself in my bedroom for many years due to COVID fears. I really, really, really didn’t want to get sick. This experience became a motivation and a calling to escape the confines of a box I had put myself in, expanding into a life of exploration.
In a global culture that lacks any meaningful rite of passage, I learned that we must create such rituals by opening our imagination to infinite curiosity. This total isolation I felt expressed itself in the jailed child, who was deeply upset by her circumstance.
More than exploration, I needed to reconnect with this child. I needed to show her that the world is bigger than her tiny cell. This is why I call it a re-searching.
So why am I here? To love my inner child, to prove to myself that I (and we) can still do hard things, to build new spaces while learning and experiencing new cultures.
Beyond all those things, I’m here to be alive. As someone who has held the roles of “journalist,” “creator” (whatever that means), or “tech enthusiast” at various stages, this research stage is wholly new to me in its approach. Each day, I wake in search of myself, for my well-being. As in, how well can I be a human in this world filled with such glaring uncertainty, fear, destruction, and distraction, and how can I help others, even one person, do the same along the way?
Another of the many questions I, and I suppose everyone else who travels, is asked is, “What do you do for work?” As a writer, community enthusiast, and researcher, the answer can be a bit complicated. When we talk about things like purpose here among friends, they’re often spiritual, occasionally about lofty goals (or even the lack thereof), hardly ever about something as meaningless as shareholder value.
The first step is to tell you that I’m researching a specific aspect of post-labor economics. I know that’s vague and jargony, sorry about that. The part that gets more complicated is when we get into the Meaning Economy and how its importance can merge with blockchain dynamics.
To better understand, we can break this down into two main questions:
• What happens when more and more people find their “calling” disrupted, or their sense of purpose upended, which, as Derek Thompson wrote for The Atlantic back in 2019, has long been made into a religious experience due to workism?
• How do we find meaning in an increasingly isolated, individualistic, chaotic, agentic, intelligence-driven world? And how can we utilize the coordination layer of the internet, that is, Ethereum, to fuel new or existing spaces for meaning?
It’s easy to quickly get on the same page about what “meaning” is when **you’re surrounded by friends, community, and a culture that (mostly) understands service-led thinking. Especially the kind of “meaning” that exists outside of producing entirely meaning-less administrative work, funnels to trap customers in useless loops, or products and services no one wants or needs.
My purpose? To utilize skills of observation to better understand myself, to better understand the world, and experience the joy of being human.
I have no blue sky grand vision that no one has ever imagined before, no groundbreaking revenue-generating idea that will totally change the world. At least not yet. In fact, at this stage, I think it’s perfectly fine that we champion, or at very least continue to discuss, certain ideas floating around to help them flourish. Like David Shapiro’s Post-Labor Economics, or Emad Mostaque’s idea of The Last Economy, or Joe Edelman’s “Rebuilding a Society on Meaning”, these are all great threads for us to pull on in future discussions. A re-searching of humanity’s purpose and larger meaning is a big enough task in itself. Let’s see where it guides our futures.
Well, thanks to Octant and the Ethereum Foundation SFC team, I believe this next stage of my storytelling journey is just beginning.
I work in cycles, the way some creatives have seasons of high output and other times of low nothingness, left to sit in the empty void of bleh. Kimiya Mag has been quite active on Telegram in my writing absence. You can even join the channel today to catch up on all the things you missed over the Summer. There’s no entry fee, no gatekeeping, nothing. Catch up on all the science, tech, and travel insights I’ve shared over the past six months.
Now that I’ve had time to settle into this new way of exploring, I have a sense of where this all goes next. Based on conversations I’ve been having both locally and with Ethereum builders, there’s a ton of opportunity to tell stories about how meaning is being shaped by accelerating technology.
That means long-form essays, research reports, and interviews with some of my favorite people, as well as local community builders across Asia.
Hẹn gặp lại bạn sớm! (see you soon)
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Riley Blackwell
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I sat on this one for a while. Editing and re-editing. Reorienting one's life for meaning while writing a book about being lost has to be some kind of paradox, but here we are. https://paragraph.com/@kimiya/in-order-to-live?referrer=0x54A80e0417008dB88036F4Fb2C4646264717f7a6
That’s such a powerful paradox—sometimes getting lost is exactly how we find what truly matters.
Recommend following along to anyone exploring meaning and purpose Thank you for putting this into the world @rileybeans it’s helping me think about my path and my work.