Multiverse and Meh: The best shows, books, podcasts and concepts of 2022

Hi everyone, 

The sky is clear in London and the air is achingly cold. We recently had our first snowfall here, and as I woke up to a blanket of white, I felt a deep urge to slow down. It’s been an intense year full of transitions for me, and while the snow fell I was being pulled with it. Invited to slow down and come to ground.

At the same time, I’ve been fired up with curiosity and excitement, pulled toward new projects and new writing. I’ve been immersed in a new piece which comes out on Thursday 22 December called ‘The Truth About Trauma’. It’s explores the role that trauma has come to play in culture, how ‘the trauma revolution’ has led to popular concepts like ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’, and how it links to ‘the problem of evil’ in philosophy and religion. Featuring big names in the trauma world like Bessel van der Kolk, Rachel Yehuda and George Bonnano, it’s a piece that keeps opening cultural Pandora’s Boxes as I write, and I’m excited to share it soon. 

As I’ve been working on it, I keep getting emails from different newsletters, magazines and websites with their lists of the top TV shows, podcasts, books of the year. I’ll be creating similar lists quarterly for paid subscribers, so thought I’d start with a big one to end the year.

But I wanted to try something a bit different. Rather than just my top TV shows, podcasts and books, I’ll also share some of the concepts and ideas I’ve found most useful or interesting this year, and common themes I see emerging in popular culture. I’ve also cheated a bit: some of the books and music on this list are things I discovered in 2022 but have been around longer. But hey, one of the themes in here is our cultural obsession with multiverses, so maybe in some other universe they came out in 2022? Everything in the list is something I’ve found uniquely relevant to the times regardless of when they came out, and I hope you find them inspiring or useful too. 

I’m also launching the Bigger Picture Substack chat with this piece, with the hope that we can create a much more extensive list together. You’ll receive a notification about that soon with instructions of how to join the conversation.

The Multiverse and The Meh

I’m going to begin with some overarching pop-culture themes of 2022 that emerged as I was making this list. Broadly, they fall into two concepts: The Rise of the Multiverse, and The Rise of ‘meh’.

Over the last few years, we’ve increasingly seen mainstream stories (particularly the Marvel cinematic universe) exploring the concept of the multiverse. This is the idea that there are multiple universes, perhaps even an infinite number being created every moment, sometimes with new time lines splitting off from every decision and interaction. This year saw the release of a truly astonishing and beautiful movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, which brought a new and unexpected twist to multiverse stories. 2022 also saw the release of the so-so (meh) Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which didn’t. A bit closer to the day to day, Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal created its own poignant comedic multiverse which is in many ways weirder and more intense than either of those films.

The wonderful Michelle Yeoh with exquisite sausage fingers

Why are multiverse stories are on the rise? First we need to look at The Rise of ‘meh’. Meh, in case you aren’t familiar, is a word (and sound) marking disinterest and lack of enthusiasm. And it’s a crucial aspect of pop culture in 2022, because so many things that are sold as huge spectacles, like Jurassic World or Morbius, turn out to be just OK, or utter crap. 

The increasing amount of ‘meh’ responses I see people having to big films and TV shows, and that I feel myself as I scroll through Netflix or the endless proliferation of podcasts on Spotify, reflects an increasing sense of tiredness and saturation with the kinds of stories we’re telling. A sense that, for all of the choice at our fingertips, most of the content we’re making is pointless or aggressively mediocre. ‘Meh’ is more than just a feeling that stories are predictable or poorly written: it’s a sigh of disappointment and tiredness. A sense that it’s not just our stories that are missing something real and tangible and human, but our whole social game.

Obviously the list in here is all pieces I personally didn’t feel ‘meh’ about, but at the same time I think the last film that I really felt grabbed the Zeitgeist and twisted a knife into it was Joker in 2019 (the sequel comes out in 2024). Increasing levels of ‘meh’ are partly a consequence of the amount of content that’s now out there, but I think it’s more rooted in a deeper cultural malaise.

The rise of ‘meh’ and our obsession with multiverses are linked. In much the same way that Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse was cold, lifeless and empty in his infamous launch film at the end of 2021, often stories about multiple realities are dislocating and alienating. They reflect our collective experience of what John Vervaeke calls the ‘combinatorial explosion’ we’re living through.

We’re faced with too much information, too many choices, too many potential outcomes and no underlying sense of cohesion and meaning to contexualise it all. And we’re so culturally disconnected from our own experience of the world we live in, that often when we imagine other realities, we struggle to come up with anything truly novel (with notable exceptions). There’s a kind of emptiness to the fictional worlds we’re making that reflects the emptiness we see in the real world we’ve created.

The inverted buildings are a metaphor.

The Standouts

Our obsession with the multiverse is a collective cry of disconnection. That’s why Everything Everywhere All At Once is so powerful: it weaves together a touching human story with an incredibly creative expression of the frantic, chaotic and insane disconnection of modern life. It’s about a struggling laundromat worker who, somewhat inexplicably, is plunged into a bizarre multiverse of many different lives she could have lived, and which she has to navigate as she struggles to keep her family together and repair her relationship with her daughter.

Compare this version of the multiverse to the one we see in Dr Strange in The Multiverse of Madness. Here, larger than life superheroes, humanised only through their cringingly self-aware quips, run around trying to save a world that doesn’t give us any reasons as to why its worth saving (there are, after all, an infinite number of them). I found it difficult to give much of a shit about any of the characters as they jumped between realities I found equally pointless. 

I spent a lot of time during the COVID lockdowns catching up on the entire Marvel catalogue (which ultimately felt like eating too much raisin chocolate - sort of good but also there are raisins). So, for better or worse, I watched it fully aware of all the characters and their backstories. I still didn’t care about them. The film went through a series of frantic set pieces that masked a deep emptiness, a ‘meh, so what’ that a lot of big-budget films and many shows are now cursed by. Some early reviews of Avatar 2 also speak to this, with some critics saying it’s an incredible visual spectacle without a grounded human story beneath it - Peter Bradshaw calls it ‘a soggy, twee, trillion-dollar screensaver’ in his review. Maybe it’s a very sophisticated commentary on post-capitalist culture, but probably it’s just about blue aliens.

‘The Rise of meh’ is exactly why I think Andor was the best TV show of this year. Ostensibly a Star Wars spin off show, it has the hallmark of good Sci-Fi in that you could transport the same story to, say, Franco’s Spain in the 1930’s or 1980’s East Berlin. Andor is spectacularly good because, like Everything Everywhere All At Once, it focuses on complex human stories within a vast and complex world. Set in a galaxy filled with people you begin to care about, placed in extraordinary but relatable situations, Andor is really about how people fight against authoritarianism, or go along with it, and the capacity of the human spirit to take on a oppressive empires. No lightsabers, no force, just exciting subterfuge, tense politics and hard human choices. And blasters.

Andor feels real; the character motivations are multi-layered, the situations feel bizarrely relatable, and the galaxy feels lived in - even, at times, mundane. And I think its quality speaks to a deep need in the culture, not just for connection, but for realness. In some sense, a defining feature of the early 2020’s is a collective sense of dislocation and derealisation.

Stories that bring us back to ourselves, and remind us of what it means to be human, are needed more than ever. I think we’ll increasingly see stories like Andor or Everything Everywhere All At Once hitting a nerve by presenting nuanced, human, relatable characters trying to find their way through a vast, confusing and overbearing reality. It is, after all, the story we’re all living in the early 2020’s. And on that happy note, onto the list!

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Books

1. Games - Agency as Art by C. Thi Nguyen

This book opened my thinking more than any other this year. Nguyen is a philosopher of games, and in a nutshell his argument is that games are the art form we use to explore different types of agency. Painting is about exploring sight, music about sound, but games are how we practice having a different set of values and motivations. Nguyen has written a great paper about how Twitter gamifies communication, and one of the most interesting ideas in this book is his concept of value capture: the idea that our individual values can be captured by those of the games we’re playing - whether in our institutions, social groups or economic systems. Anyone who’s familiar with the concepts of Moloch, Game B, or game theory should check this book out.

2. The Revolt of The Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch

I have both N.S. Lyons and Katherine Dee to thank for turning me on to Lasch. This book is actually from 1997, a heady and optimistic era when five twenty-somethings could live in a cavernous New York apartments and not worry about global warming or police departments stocking up on murder robots.

They wouldn’t last 5 minutes against a murder robot

The smug optimism of the West in the 1990’s makes Lasch’s critique of class divides all the more impressive and ahead of its time. A history professor, Lasch explored the way in which society’s elites had abandoned their moral values, as well as large swathes of the middle and working classes. He lay much of the blame for this within educational and media institutions, and argued that American elites were escaping into a ‘hyperreality’ of concepts and theories that have no real bearing on the real world. I’ve seen similar critiques spring up across the political spectrum this year. In an age when Elon Musk is booed by 15,000 people after buying Twitter on a whim, Lasch is, quite deservedly, getting a second look by many.

3. Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

We’re going farther back in time now, all the way to the revolutionary spirit of the West Coast of the USA in the 1960’s. I read this while researching my book, and in the process fell in love with Didion’s writing. A journalist, she was at the forefront of the 60’s and 70’s counterculture and covered Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love (revealing its hedonism, abuse and vapidity in the process), profiled revolutionary ideas and thinkers, and the music scene of the era. She’s a phenomenal writer, and I’d highly recommend this book as a glimpse into the era during which so many of our existing cultural tensions arose.   

Podcasts

1. Mother Country Radicals

Staying on the counterculture theme, this incredible podcast explores the youth revolutionary movements of the 1960’s, in particular the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. It’s hosted and narrated by Zayd Ayers, the son of two of the Weather Underground’s leaders, Bernadette Dohrn (who was known as ‘The Most Dangerous Woman in America’) and Bill Ayers. Bombs, prison breaks, civil rights and revolutionary zeal fill every episode, and it’s a fascinating glimpse into the roots of the civil rights movements of today.

2. Three Bean Salad

A palate cleanser that has nothing to do with politics or culture, and everything to do with three British comedians sitting around talking about random topics sent in by listeners. There isn’t much more to it than that, but it’s consistently hilarious and the right kind of weird. It’s gone from strength to strength this year, but I’d recommend starting at the beginning. 

3. Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Casteneda

A thanks to Erik Davis for introducing me to this one. Trickster is the unbelievable true story of Carlos Casteneda (not his real name) whose book The Teachings of Don Juan (Don Juan probably didn’t exist) changed the landscape of spirituality in the West and had a huge influence on countless writers, intellectuals and film makers (including George Lucas). The podcast explores this fascinating and mercurial character, his lies, his genius, and how he was instrumental in the birth of the New Age, early psychedelia, and in some ways the postmodern sensibility. A special shoutout to a truly insane episode that tells the story of Casteneda’s shamanic trolling of the famed filmmaker Federico Fellini in the most unbelievable and bizarre way imaginable.

TV Shows 

1. Andor 

I shared in the intro why I think this show is so good on a broader level. What I didn’t talk about there was how well-crafted it is. The script, the character development, the special effects are all incredibly tight and satisfying. Perhaps for the first time in the Star Wars universe, as a viewer you have a sense that this is an actual universe that people exist in. They have jobs and careers. They have unique cultures and histories. They have, like us, power dynamics that move through all levels of society and through the heart of every person (or droid). Bring on season 2.

2. The Rehearsal

In many ways, Nathan Fielder’s newest show is more meta than any of the Marvel multiverse movies. The concept is that Fielder helps people to rehearse difficult conversations or encounters with an absurdly elaborate team of actors and sets that will allow them to practice the conversation over and over. But it doesn’t stop there. Fielder begins rehearsing within the rehearsals, playing on his comedic (or actual?) awkward persona to glorious effect. It really is unlike anything on TV right now, which is usually the case with Fielder’s work. 

3. Mythic Quest

Another palate cleanser, in here because it’s just so enjoyable. From the creators of my favourite sitcom of all time, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, this show hit its third season this year and is as brilliant as ever. Set in a game studio, it’s consistently funny, touching and creative. A shoutout to the way they manage to poke fun at corporate wokeness without falling into easy traps, and keeping the nuance intact.   

4. Everything Everywhere All At Once

I explored above why I think this movie worked so well, but I’m loathe to try and explain it further, which will make sense if you’ve seen it. If you haven’t checked it out yet, watch the trailer here and see if it tickles your fancy (with sausage fingers). 

Music 

1. 2030 by Gone Gone Beyond 

This album actually came out in 2021, but it’s so good I’ve included it in this list. A unique combination of. The album name, 2030, is a reference to the date many believe marks the last moment for reducing carbon emissions sufficiently to avoid catastrophic planetary damage. The album itself isn’t particularly political or environmental, but amazing ensemble acoustics and particularly beautiful vocals by Kat Factor make it something special. 

2. Capricorn Sun by TSHA

Right, this one actually did come out this year! I spent much of my university days playing traditional Irish flute in pubs in Dublin during the week, and going out on the weekends dancing to house and techno into the wee hours… of the following week. It was a strange musical double life, and while those party days are (mainly) behind me, I still play traditional music and still love listening to house music, though usually in the gym now (the house music, not the Irish flute). TSHA is an up and coming producer who’s going from strength to strength. Her most recent album Capricorn Sun is a step up from her already excellent catalogue and worth checking out.  

3. The Tide by Wildlight

This album came out a few years ago, but has been another fixture of my auditory year. If you did a Rebel Wisdom course or online event this year, you’ve a track from this album a lot of tracks from this. It’s a vocal-led electronica collaboration between David Sugalski (aka The Polish Ambassador - also excellent and worth checking out) and Ayla Nereo (ditto). Vibrant, unique, beautiful and great to dance to - there’s also an acoustic version that I’ve been enjoying. Find it on Spotify here.  

Ideas and Concepts

Moving on from content, here are some of the ideas and concepts I’ve found most inspiring this year. 

1. Embodied Cognition 

Earlier this year I ran a course called Embodiment and Flow, and had my mind blown (once again) by John Vervaeke as I started to understand the real implications of 4E cognitive science. I’m actually going to include an excerpt from my upcoming book The Bigger Picture to explain what it is, and why we need to understand it to make sense of the world.

The latest cognitive science is known as 4E Cognitive Science. It argues that, far from being located solely in the brain, our cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended.

It is embodied because it is inseparable from our experience as a physical body. Researcher Barbara Tversky has shown how the way we physically move through space changes how we think and how we solve problems. Our concepts and ideas are inseparable from our gestures, feelings, and sensations. We can see hints of this in our own language when we talk about ‘moving on’ from a difficult period, or ‘taking a step back’ to reevaluate a situation. When we admire someone, we ‘look up to them,’ and when we’re feeling excited about an idea, we talk about ‘leaning into it.’

Our cognition is also embedded in the world, inseparable from the environment to which we’ve adapted. A whale is embedded in the ocean, and it doesn’t make sense to conceptualize it as an animal outside of that environment. Cognition is also enacted: Everything you do impacts the world around you and creates new realities that in turn constrain or open up possibilities for you. If you save money, you are opening up possibilities that wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t.

Finally our cognition is extended; it moves through and responds to other people, technology, and the environment. Studies have shown that, as human beings, we perceive our tools as an extension of our bodies. For example, we don’t have to think about how wide our car is getting through a narrow street; we just know. In a sense, the car and our body meld together.

 In Cognition in the Wild, anthropologist and sailor Ed Hutchins explores the question of who navigates a ship. It isn’t a single person, he argues, but a whole network of people and their technologies. You could ask the same question about who built your phone or your e-reader. They were created by a ‘distributed cognition’ of many minds and hearts and hands – an intelligence that extends across countries and interacts with technology to create. All of our big problems are solved by this kind of distributed cognition.

In case four E’s aren’t enough, John Vervaeke has argued for two more. The first is emotion. In a course I ran with him titled ‘Embodiment and Flow,’ he explained that ‘we have to understand that cognition is not cold calculation. It's always got an affective, motivational, emotional aspect. All cognition is about caring or not caring about taking a risk which has affective consequences.’

His sixth E, exaptation, is the one that may be most relevant to how we can bring back useful information from psychedelic experiences. Exaptation is a term from evolutionary biology, describing the process whereby features of an organism acquire functions they weren’t originally adapted for. One good example is the tongue, which allows us to manipulate food but was exapted to allow us to speak, as well. A bird already has feathers to fly, so nature helped it use those same feathers for showing off to potential mates. Vervaeke argues that when we’re talking about concepts, ‘You're basically taking the same machinery you use for moving around physical space and you’re exapting it.’

A practice like Tai Chi, which can improve our physical balance, can often give us a more balanced view of people or help us flow between different ideas more fluently. Practices like mindfulness that allow us to decenter and accept our experience can help us listen to others without taking what they’re saying personally, and pay closer attention to what they’re actually saying.

2. Virtuals vs Physicals 

Another concept that’s really changed my thinking this year is the idea that our social tensions can be defined as a war between what N.S. Lyons calls Virtuals and Physicals. He introduced this idea in his piece Reality Honks Back which came out in February 2022. I did an interview with him about China and the Ukraine a few months later which you can find here. In short, he’s arguing (similar to Lasch) that we’re seeing an increasing disconnect between elites who work and communicate primarily online and in the virtual realms of ideas and theories, and the Physicals who do the actual jobs (e.g driving trucks) that enable that virtual lifestyle to exist.

A shoutout here to Mary Harrington and Katherine Dee who have also put out pieces that have hammered home the growing sense of dislocation and disconnection within and between these groups, and the nature of that ‘virtual escape’ by the better-offs in society. Pieces like that have shifted my thinking a lot this year, and increasingly I’ve begun to see the culture wars as class wars shrouded in identity politics.

As we witness the rise of AI art and the metaverse, I think this disconnection (and our responses to it) will increasingly be a feature of the 2020’s. There’s a meme Lyons mentions in his piece, Touch Grass, which is basically a way to tell someone to get off their computer and go and touch some grass, to feel something real, that really caught my attention. It’s a push toward embodied, felt experience and away from an escape into a world defined by concepts, theory and virtual reality that feels increasingly vital for our survival. 

3. Metaphysics Eats Culture for Breakfast

A well-known phrase in business is ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ It’s often falsely attributed to management consultant and writer Peter Drucker, but its origins are unknown. Its enduring popularity might speak to an important truth: the value system we are part of is far more impactful than the strategies we put into place to change its symptoms.

Our strategies for changing the world are inspired in part by our values, which inform our culture, and so for a while I’ve had the thought that values are the level we need to work at to change culture, and thereby the systems, structures and beliefs leading us to ruin. 

In the course of writing my book, I started to consider that trying to change our behaviour at the level of values isn’t going to cut it. We draw our values from our beliefs about what reality is - our metaphysics. And so I propose that metaphysics eats culture for breakfast. What we believe to be real is the most significant factor in determining our values, and in turn our cultures, which birth and change our institutions and politics. And so change has to happen at the deepest level if it’s going to have any significant impact: at the level of what we think the nature of reality is.

There is another aspect to this - the idea that we can’t actually create our own values anyway. They come from somewhere else. As N.S. Lyons points out in his recent piece on C.S Lewis and JRR Tolkien, Lewis argued that “The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour…”

So where do we get our values from? From something beyond us. They can’t be drawn from the same soil as our existing problems. This is why sacred experiences are such vital tools of cultural transformation: the mystical experience gives us insights that come from far beyond our current conceptions of ourselves, and reality itself. In the same way, it may be that effective systems change can only come from outside of our existing frame on reality.

That is what the sacred is: the mystery beyond our current conceptions. It’s what lies outside of the values of the social game; values Nguyen argues all too easily subsume our own personal values. What an experience of the sacred reveals to us is that outside of our own frame is a sacred aliveness, a purpose, an intensity of being that we have no choice but to surrender to. 

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And so ends my anachronous list of the best content and concepts of 2022. Now it’s your turn: I’m about to open up the Substack chat and hope you’ll add your own favourite books, shows, podcasts and ideas of the year.

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