The Novelty Famine

Why nothing feels fresh in 2024

There is an ancient story that tells us reality is a beautiful tapestry. On one side, symmetrical and elegantly patterned. But flip it over, and you’ll find a tangled mess of threads. Beneath clarity is chaos, and together they weave the world.

As a writer, I often use the metaphor of ‘following threads’ because that’s how it feels to tell a story. We’re all able to look out into the world, grasp particular strands and weave a tapestry to express to one another what we’re feeling. 

Recently, I’ve been stuck on the underside of the rug, struggling to weave what I’m seeing into a coherent form. It’s not for want of trying; I’ve been reading books on the culture wars, papers about the history of secularisation, and articles about psychology. I’ve been tracking advances in AI, watching internet dramas play out, and digesting political commentary. I’ve also hosted New Ways of Knowing, where brilliant teachers shared their wisdom, and our brilliant participants dived into the complexity of the meta-crisis. 

But no matter how much I research, I still feel uncertain. When I close my eyes, that uncertainty stretches into a deep silence. As a writer, I suffer from a compulsion to break silence. My fingers itch to have ten flickering opinions and weave them into a story. But the more I’ve tried to effort words onto a page, to share a perspective I think will be of value to you, the more that silence has deepened.

At first, it scared me. For the last seven years, my mission has been to follow the threads of the zeitgeist to find perspectives that might take us into new territory. It’s what we did at Rebel Wisdom, what my book is about, and what I’ve been attempting for the last year and a half with this Substack. In that time I’ve written around 40 pieces exploring popular culture, the meta-crisis, the meaning crisis, spirituality and psychedelics. I’ve loved every minute, and I’m forever grateful that you’re interested in reading. 

Not knowing what to write about has been deeply uncomfortable, so at first I resisted it. A familiar voice in my head told me that the solution was discipline: sit down and force it out. Grab the world and twist it to wring out the last drops of sense. But that voice has one solution for everything, and it didn’t seem like the answer to this problem.

Eventually, I stopped resisting. I decided, reluctantly, to accept my lostness and see where it might lead. This lostness might be personal to me, but many people I’ve spoken with recently have expressed some version of feeling exhausted by culture and unsure where to focus. Collectively, we’re watching two old men shuffle toward the Whitehouse, while thousands die in two horrific wars. Our TV shows are repetitive, our politics corrupt, and the battle between progressives and conservatives goes on and on without resolution. Everything feels exhausted, thirsting for transformation.

Normally when I write a piece, I know roughly where I’m going, even if I don’t know how I’ll get there. This piece is different, and it will take me past the edge of my comfort zone.

It isn’t about making an argument, or weaving a tapestry. Instead, I’m going to share with you the threads I’ve been following, and use Somatic Inquiry - a type of talking meditation where we pay attention to the sensations in our body, our thoughts, feelings, and mental images as they arise - to allow those threads to unravel as I write. I’ll do minimal editing for sense and clarity, but otherwise this will be a moving inquiry, one I hope will open something new.

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Following the Threads

It feels right to start by listing the topics I’ve been tracking and see where that goes. 

The first is the rise of traditionalism. There are a few angles on this I’ve been curious about. One is the cultural level, with Gen Z kids choosing to drink less and have less sex, and generally be more socially conservative than previous generations. This feels distinct but related to a more sinister kind of traditionalism; the slow creep of fascism in the West, and some on the religious right in the US calling for a Christian ethno-state.

I’m also noticing a revival of spiritual traditionalism, with the ‘spiritual but not religious’ stance feeling increasingly empty for many people I know. The philosopher Jordan Hall recently converted to Christianity, having been a key proponent of trying to find ‘the religion that isn’t a religion’ and create a new kind of conscious community. I found his conversion story moving, but I don’t think converting to an Axial age religion is right for everyone, and I’m not sure how it scales. It’s made me curious whether there’s a way to blend pluralism and traditionalism; a poly-textured traditionalism that can hold the complexity of our spiritual sensibilities today within deep-rooted structures of belief. 

Another thread spooling loosely through my fingers connects to technology. Specifically, our exhaustion with the online world. The repetitive, meaningless expansion of content in so many parts of our lives. Millions of podcasts press against hypnotic Instagram feeds, which spew into the real world as people wearing Apple Vision Pros swipe at air in cafes and subways, immersed in their own digitally overlaid fantasies and utterly disconnected from the social fabric. I’m curious whether we’re moving toward 'The Great Unplugging’; a large-scale rejection of being online, and the mainstreaming of the idea that the internet is toxic.

I feel as though these all relate somehow. I can taste a dichotomy between drifting into a realm of ideas, and returning to our bodies and our connection to the land. That brings to mind an image of a house within a forest. It’s imbued with a sense of homecoming and return. 

Deep in my bones I know that a return to the sacred is what’s being called for at this time in history, but have no idea what it looks like or where it will come from. In my recent conversation with Josh Schrei we talked about the promise and challenge of a return to a Paleolithic understanding of the world. Coming back to our bodies, re-embedding ourselves in the natural world. I have a lot of sympathy with this idea, especially as Terence McKenna’s concept of the Archaic Revival was so influential on my early thinking.

McKenna’s idea was to bring the best of our paleolithic ancestry - initiatory practices, rituals, tattoos, body alteration, psychedelics, a connection to a living world - and translate them into the high-tech madness in which we live in today. McKenna was fond of the idea of a ‘forward escape’; he argued that we can’t return to a previous age to save ourselves, but need to draw from the past to push our way through our hyper-real culture to a new reality.  

McKenna wondered if there is something intentional about the way our technology is evolving. Whether it is pulling us toward an inescapable future with an evolutionary intensity and a clarity of purpose we don’t yet understand. This brings to mind something Schrei talks about; the deep-seated urge we have with AI just to see what will happen the more it evolves. I feel that urge in myself. A pull toward the edge of catastrophe. It feels like looking down at a void, hearing a voice call to me in a language I once knew but forgot long ago. 

That voice echoes every time I use an AI image service, or ask ChatGPT a question, or watch Sora videos. It is the voice of a siren, a voice that says ‘there is no stopping this. Surrender.’ Does that voice call from beyond, or within us? Is it calling us to our own destruction?

I feel resistance now. I want to fight against that voice. AI is transforming the economy, but what I’m most concerned about is the effect it will have on our spirituality. And what of tradition? Will AI try to make this obsolete too? Google recently got into trouble because its woke Gemini chatbot was pumping out historical images with white people erased from the scene. It’s turned into a controversy, but it points to a much darker possibility; that AI will rewrite our history without the intervention of humans. That it will eventually decide what happened in the past. That it will draw us ever closer to something I think is inevitable at this point: an AI religion.

My heart is beating faster. This topic makes me feel uncomfortable, not just because it’s uncanny. There’s a flutter in my chest, but my arms feel stronger as I type. I’m excited by the weirdness, by the mystery AI offers. It’s awful but it’s also new. 

My leg is tapping now because that’s brought to mind a phrase that has been spinning through my mind for weeks: Make It New! It’s the title of the poet Ezra Pound's seminal book on the Modernist aesthetic. He was writing 90 years ago, after World War I had upended everything people thought was certain. The old was out, destructive, deranged. We had to make the world new to thrive. 

This was a profoundly progressive idea at the time. It used to be that progressives shouted ‘make it new’ and conservatives shouted ‘make it old!’ Today, we have empty performances of both positions. Earlier this week, über-progressive journalist Taylor Lorenz interviewed Chaya Raichik, head of the conservative channel Libs of TikTok. Taylor, wearing a mask outdoors in the LA sunshine, skilfully interviewed Raichik, whose responses often felt half-thought out, even though I agree with some of her positions. It was a cultural moment, but it was also boring. It felt tired. I found myself disliking both of them. More than anything, I was bored because they were simply repeating cultural beefs. They aren’t offering anything new. They are performing, and performance is repetition.

In 2016, the culture war felt interesting because it was breaking taboos. The idea of being ‘red pilled’ became a semi-revelatory force as the excesses of progressive arrogance were laid bare. Now channels like Libs of TikTok with their ‘lib bashing’ feel trite, petty, played out. We have consumed taboos as we have consumed everything else, and now the internet hungers for more but we cannot feed it. Instead, it begins to feed itself as AI advances. The beast becomes restless, and only God knows what will happen when it leaves its lair and comes slouching toward reality. 

I’m noticing frustration in my belly. No, it’s a longing. I really, really want something new. How do we move past the performative exhaustion of the 2020’s into a reality we haven’t yet imagined? For Pound, writing 90 years ago, the new art and new perspectives he was calling for could never be completely autonomous. They had to draw on the aesthetics of the past and applied to the context of the present.

What is it to consider the aesthetics of the past in the context of 2024? We have no idea, because the context of 2024 is chaos. There is too much of everything. It’s all too much.

I stopped writing here. I could feel the silence again, sinking like an anchor drifting to the seabed. I remembered John O’Donohue’s words: silence is where the soul resides. It can never be fully seen or known. It is the opposite of our hyper-salient, hyper-aware modern environment. The best light for the soul is candle-light, he says, because it flickers in and out, casting shadows for the soul to hide in.

Maybe I keep feeling this silence because this is where I need to stay right now. There are times to move, and there are times to wait. Times to craft in the sun and times to watch the stars. To be forced by the cold to retreat to hidden places and listen as the wind tells its story. Maybe the intensity of 2024 demands silence, and all my attempts to make sense of it are failing because what is being called for collectively is to listen. 

Then why am I writing?

Because I am compelled to. But I long to be crafted by the world instead of trying to craft one. I feel a swaying in my torso as I write that; the image of a tree comes to mind. It moves with the breeze, but is deeply rooted. Maybe how we approach our high-tech, hyper-salient world shouldn’t be defined by total surrender or total will. They imply each other; life is a dance between action and inaction, surrender and agency, love and strife. Between novelty and boredom.

There. That word - novelty. That’s the heart of something. I feel heavier on my chair now, and I’ve closed my eyes as I type to let the rootedness and the movement of my fingers sing a song. 

The reason I feel so uncertain is that I’m looking out into the world and trying to find novelty. But I can’t find it. Culture is defined by endless, empty repetition. What Baudrillard called a hyperreality. Everything is a pallid mimicry of something deeper, repeated so many times that we’ve lost the original essence.

Novelty is the transformative force that can halt this decline, because it’s the essence that can’t be replicated. It’s the emergent, unfolding complexity of life itself. 

We’re living through a novelty famine. Yes. I like that phrase, it has the right texture. Capitalism has commodotised novelty, endlessly replicating it until first we feel fatigue, and then emptiness. When the new becomes old, the old seems new. Traditionalism feels fresh. Wholesome is the new punk, boring is based. 

Maybe this is why Christianity has become appealing to people I know; it seems fresh and new. But this presents a paradox, because a true encounter with novelty is an encounter with the unknown, and tradition is already known. 

So what is true novelty? I don’t know. But I feel it as aliveness, as humanity, as soul. It speaks to us from outside our existing frame of perception. Sometimes it travels from the bottom up, expressed through new combinations of existing elements. At other times it comes top down, through revelation.

That word hits me straight in the gut. Now I feel a rising, a freshness, a longing. Revelation sings from a place beyond us which is eternally new. 

I stopped typing after I wrote that and sat with my chin cradled in my hands, staring at the floor and thinking. What births the eternally new? The sacred. Revelation emerges from the sacred.

Christianity is a revelatory religion. The truth is spoken clearly from a burning bush, or manifests itself as a God who walks on earth to sacrifice himself. Maybe this is another reason why people are converting to Christianity, because revelation is by its nature regenerative.

But revelation can come from many places. The Romantic poets understood this, going into the wilderness to experience the Sublime; that moment of awe that renders all our categories obsolete. What, today, has the power to render our existing categories obsolete?

We do, when we align to the sacred. But maybe there is nothing any of us can do to create revelation; we can only steward the right conditions for it. To listen to its song and sing it back.

I feel the inquiry drawing to a close. Maybe a new question has come out of this; what can we do to create the conditions for revelation to transform culture? 

I see candlelight in my mind’s eye. Flickering darkness, quietly tending to exhausted souls. Giving us the strength and clarity to steward revelation. Revelation that doesn’t get posted about. Revelation held in silence until the moment is right. Our cultural soil is parched and cracked, waiting for something new. We can’t know where it will come from, only that it will come.