The Turning of Worlds, from Mastery to Mystery
Living through the collapse of meaning and arriving, finally, at the threshold of being. A journey through the eras, and the quiet emergence of post-cognitive life.
“We are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world.” ~David Whyte
Preface:
Sometimes it feels like the world is turning faster than we can name, shifting under our feet in ways we can barely see.
This is a story of walking through eras of meaning and what happens when we find ourselves standing at the edge of something new.
It’s a map traced by memory, loss, rediscovery, and the quiet emergence of a different way of being.
I know that words like "modernism," "postmodernism," and "metamodernism" can sound a little academic at first. But what they point to is something very real—something we live inside every day, even if we don't usually name it.
These eras shape the invisible frameworks that structure how we experience meaning, community, identity, and change. They're part of the reason I call this space "Beyond the Visible"—because so much of what shapes us is just under the surface, felt more than seen.
This isn't an academic essay. It's a personal journey through the deeper atmospheres that have shaped my life—and maybe yours, too.
Thank you for walking with me.
A Turning of Worlds
For the past century, the world has turned through vast arcs of meaning and disillusionment. Each era—the modern, the postmodern, the hypermodern, the metamodern—has tried to explain who we are, how we know what we know, and how we’re supposed to live in an uncertain world.
These movements unfold across generations. But for me, they have been more than historical footnotes. They have been the lived environment of my life, stages I’ve walked through, breathed, embodied.
Though the wider world may have been experiencing the currents of postmodernism during my lifetime, my own personal journey has carried me through each era: the hope of modernism, the striving of hypermodernism, the deconstruction of postmodernism, the yearning of metamodernism, and now, toward something quieter, something deeper.
I have not simply read about these shifts. I have lived them.
And in living them, I have come to sense that we are approaching the edge of something new, a deeper invitation into being itself.
A threshold is opening through the quiet crumbling of old maps and the slow emergence of a different way of inhabiting reality.
Before we can step across, we must trace the arcs that brought us here, to understand the paths they carved through our lives..
Only then can we see the new path that is beginning to appear.
Modernism — The Age of Mastery
Growing up, I experienced the spirit of modernism firsthand as a child moving through a world that still believed in progress. My father’s diplomatic career carried our family across continents to Accra, Tehran, Moscow, and Rio de Janeiro, all cities that, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, were pulsing with the energy of late modernist optimism. Often a half-step behind the Western world, these places lived inside the dream of progress; the hope that new buildings, new technologies, and rational governance could build a better tomorrow.
Modernism was born out of a deep faith in human ingenuity. Coming out of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, it carried the hope that reason, science, and progress could reshape the world for the better. The old myths and religious certainties were fading, but in their place rose something equally ambitious:
The belief that, with enough knowledge and creativity, we could master existence itself.
You can feel the spirit of Modernism in the boldness of Picasso’s early Cubism, smashing old visual perspectives and reassembling them into something new. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist,” he said.
You can hear it in the beauty of Debussy’s Clair de Lune, breaking away from classical structures into something more fluid and emotive, and in the soaring energy of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, blending the elegance of classical tradition with the raw rhythms of the modern city. You can walk through it in the clean lines of Le Corbusier’s architecture, designing cities like machines for living.
Modernism was all about control, design, innovation. It believed that structure, form, and reason could overcome chaos.
In literature, you had James Joyce breaking open the old narrative forms, experimenting with stream of consciousness, as if language itself could map the mind. In politics, there was the dream of rational planning, the idea that perfect societies could be engineered by human reason alone.
I still remember the first time I experienced air conditioning at the age of twelve, when we moved to the United States. And my first mobile phone didn’t arrive until I was twenty-four. Modernism wasn’t just an era for me; it was the felt reality of my early life, a time when the future brought promises of control, comfort, and mastery.
But even within the promises, a quiet question lingered, barely formed yet already stirring:
What if human reason wasn’t enough to save us?
What if all our structures were built on shifting sand?
World Wars, genocides, and the rise of totalitarian systems had already begun to crack the modernist dream in the twentieth century. By the time I was growing up, the cracks were still mostly patched over with ambition and optimism, but the underlying fault lines were there, especially in the developed world.
And into those cracks, something new would eventually creep in.
Postmodernism — The Age of Deconstruction
As the ruins of modernist dreams piled up after two world wars, people began to lose faith in the very idea of grand narratives. The promise that reason would save us now felt hollow. The myth of unstoppable progress had been shattered by the brutal realities of war, colonialism, and technological destruction.
In its place came a new sensibility: postmodernism.
Postmodernism didn’t try to build a new tower.
It questioned the idea of towers altogether.
It saw that every story claiming to be universal, whether religious, political, scientific, or artistic, was just that: a story, shaped by power, culture, and human frailty.
You can hear the postmodern spirit in Andy Warhol’s pop art, turning consumer goods and celebrities into icons, blurring the line between high art and mass culture. You can feel it in the dreamlike, unsettling narratives of David Lynch’s films, where coherence dissolves and mystery remains. You can read it in the playful, slippery texts of Jacques Derrida, who revealed that meaning is never fixed, always deferred, always slipping just beyond our grasp—because of language itself.
Postmodernism reveled in irony, fragmentation, imitation / pastiche. It made collage out of history. It pulled apart language, revealing how it never quite touches the real.
The credo of postmodernism might be:
"There is no stable truth—only interpretations, endlessly circling."
In its liberating moments, postmodernism shattered oppressive structures and opened space for marginalized voices. In its darker moods, it led to paralysis, cynicism, and exhaustion.
If nothing is real, and everything is just a construct, then why care? Why build anything at all?
For me, postmodernism came alive not just as an idea, but as a lived experience. It came as the inner unraveling that followed a series of life transformations.
Significant relationship splits, geographic relocations, career shifts … each tore away pieces of the stories I had once relied on to frame my identity. What had seemed stable and self-evident began to feel provisional, mutable, uncertain. In that space of rupture, I turned inward, stepping onto a path that would reshape me from the inside out.
Through frameworks like Carl Jung’s depth psychology and Internal Family Systems (IFS), I began to see the multiplicity within myself. The fragmented parts and hidden wounds, the mythic archetypes stirring just below consciousness. Practices like fasting, sadhana, meditation, vision quests, and Lakota Sun Dance rites opened cracks in the surface of my mind, inviting something deeper to come through. And the nondual teachings I encountered illuminated a path beyond subject/object separation entirely.
In many ways, the postmodern spirit taught me how to unlearn—how to question both the outer systems and the inner conditioning that shaped my view of self and world.
It was a time of deconstruction and accelerated individuation.
The old scaffolding fell away, and slowly, something truer began to take form within the clearing.
Beneath all the cleverness, a deep yearning remained:
A yearning for connection, for beauty, for meaning—not naive, but earned.
The stage was set for something new to rise.
Hypermodernism — The Age of Acceleration
You can hear the pulse of hypermodernism in the robotic beats of Daft Punk, blending human longing with machine precision. You can see it in the glossy surfaces of Zaha Hadid’s futuristic architecture, curving and warping beyond old geometries. You can feel it in the mythos of figures like Elon Musk, projecting visions of colonizing Mars while Earth burns under the weight of unresolved crises.
Hypermodern life is life lived in overdrive:
Constant connectivity through smartphones and social media
Information overload faster than anyone can digest
An endless churn of disruption, innovation, obsolescence, and reinvention
The credo of hypermodernism might be:
"There’s no stable meaning—but you must adapt, perform, optimize—and you must do it now."
In some ways, hypermodernism took the anxiety of postmodernism and put it on steroids. Instead of sitting with existential doubt, it drowned it in endless notifications, perpetual upgrades, and a frenetic cult of productivity.
Before I ever deeply questioned the structures around me, I fully participated in them—striving, accelerating, believing that ambition, innovation, and optimization would carve out a meaningful life.
Growing up as a Gen Xer, it felt natural to step into a world moving faster and faster. From attending one of the world’s top business schools, to building a career shaped by technology, disruption, and global connectivity, to standing on stages and publishing thought leadership in the new digital economy—I lived inside the belief that speed and innovation were signs of progress.
Especially through my early work in social media, I found myself at the heart of a culture that simultaneously connected and fragmented people, inspired and exhausted them. What once felt like a great democratizing force slowly revealed another face: a machinery of hustle, consumerism, performance, and unrelenting comparison.
At the time, I didn’t question it. The constant connectivity, the endless churn of upgrades, the drive to adapt and optimize all seemed inevitable.
It was only later, in hindsight, that I could see more clearly:
Speed dazzles, but it doesn’t satisfy.
Innovation impresses, but it doesn’t heal.
Acceleration solves for performance, not for belonging.
Beneath the glittering momentum, a quieter hunger was growing. Not just to go faster, but to feel again. To care, to create, to belong. To rebuild the soul after fragmentation.
And when it did, it would mark the beginning of a different journey, the next turn of the spiral.
Metamodernism — The Age of Oscillation
Out of the exhaustion of postmodern irony and the burnout of hypermodern speed, a new sensibility began to emerge—a kind of hopeful grief, an aching sincerity that knows how broken things are and still reaches toward meaning.
This is metamodernism. Its onset coincided with COVID-19 for me.
Metamodernism doesn’t reject postmodern insights. It definitely carries the scars of fragmentation, and most definitely the humility of complexity.
But it also dares to feel again—to hope, to dream—even knowing those dreams will always be imperfect.
It oscillates between opposites:
Between irony and sincerity
Between knowing and believing
Between systems thinking and soulfulness
Between intellectual complexity and mythic simplicity
You can feel it in the existential landscapes of films like Arrival and Annihilation, where time, language, identity, and loss are explored with depth, sincerity, and mythic resonance. You can hear it in the striking, poignant poetry of David Whyte, where grief and beauty weave together without falling into either sentimentality or despair. You can read it in the writings of Hanzi Freinacht, who sketches new possibilities for a politics of inner development as much as outer reform.
The credo of metamodernism might be:
"We know meaning is provisional—and we choose to care anyway."
Metamodernism is both deeply aware of the impossibility of pure truth, and stubbornly committed to beauty, sincerity, and imaginative possibility. It offers us something postmodernism could not:
A way to live inside brokenness without surrendering to despair.
Yet for all its brilliance, metamodernism still lives mostly in the realm of cognition: mapping, modeling, weaving systems of meaning, meta-reflections upon reflections.
It opened the door for us to feel again, but the center of gravity is still often thinking about feeling—meta-awareness as an art form.
It’s beautiful, deeply felt, connective even, yet one is left with a question: and now what?
For me, metamodernism is close to the heart because it mirrors a truth I encountered in Jungian work: the necessity of holding the tension of the opposites.
Carl Jung taught that this capacity to stay with paradox, rather than collapsing into one side or the other, is key to individuation. Similarly, Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory points to Stage 2 integration as the moment where we no longer simply transcend earlier stages, but hold them, honoring their gifts, without losing ourselves in their limitations. You can see this same movement in Robert Kegan’s stages of adult development, and in Spiral Dynamics, too.
In so many visions of growth, there’s an acknowledgment:
We must move beyond the duality of polarization in order to emerge more whole, more compassionate, more deeply human.
It’s not about erasing difference. It’s about carrying complexity with a larger heart.
I remember a conversation with a lifelong friend over lunch that brought this into sharp relief. At one point, he said something that struck me:
"I don’t like to pity anyone."
He was speaking, I think, from an Ayn Randian objectivist view: the idea that every person should strive to be their best self, in a kind of Nietzschean way. I understood his reasoning. But something about it troubled me.
It seemed to me that behind those words was an unconscious defense: a need to maintain a strong, upright identity by rejecting the vulnerability of compassion. As if extending empathy might somehow weaken the self. As if acknowledging the suffering of another was a threat to personal sovereignty.
What I felt instead was the quiet truth that "there but for the grace of God go I." Not pity from above, but solidarity from within. To stand in empathy, without collapsing into saviorism or superiority, is one of the hardest things we can do.
And it is exactly the kind of tension of opposites—strength and tenderness, selfhood and solidarity—that metamodernism invites us to live.
This has been my jam since I stepped into it several years ago; I found the others.
For a time, living within this oscillation felt like enough. The ability to hold complexity, to dance between hope and doubt, to honor paradox without collapsing into it—that was a hard-won grace.
And yet, quietly, something deeper began to stir. Not just the ability to think or feel about life, but the longing to simply be within it.
A deeper current calling from below the waves of mind.
The New Threshold — Post-Cognitive Being
I’ve felt glimpses of this new current stirring within me, especially during recent days spent in Rio de Janeiro.
There, in the vivid immediacy of life, I could feel it—not as an idea, but as something alive in the air, stirring through me, unfiltered.
It was in the impromptu drum circles by the beach kiosks, where people danced samba without needing a reason. It was in the simple sweetness of sipping fresh coconut water under the hot summer sun. It was in the easy exchanges with the vendors at the weekend hippie fair in Ipanema, and the familiar kindness of the waiter who remembered my face and smiled with the warmth of a whole culture behind him.
There was no overthinking. No analyzing. Only the immediacy of showing up fully inside the moment, inside the texture of life itself.
It wasn’t an escape from complexity. It was the discovery that being is deeper than complexity.
As metamodernism oscillates between hope and doubt, irony and sincerity, another invitation whispers from the edges.
Not another movement of ideas.
Not another meta-system.
Something deeper.
A return to something older than thought, yet not a regression.
A movement beyond mastery, beyond irony, beyond acceleration, even beyond oscillation.
A return to being itself.
We might call it, for now, post-cognitive being.
In a world where machines will soon know more facts, faster and more completely than any human mind could hold, our work is not to race them.
Our work is to remember what they can never touch.
The immediacy of lived experience.
The symbolic hum of the world meeting the soul.
The mystery of choosing, sensing, relating—not as information, but as participation.
Post-cognitive being recognizes:
That existence is not something to be mapped and mastered; it is something to be inhabited.
That the deepest truths are not found in external archives, but in the relational spaces between us, in the between, where meaning arises like a living flame.
That knowledge is a tool, but being is the ground.
That symbols, stories, dreams, and relationships are not lesser modes of knowing—they are the lifeblood of our humanity.
You can feel the early tremors of this movement in the return of mythic storytelling. In the revival of ritual and pilgrimage among people tired of optimization. In the slow gatherings where silence speaks louder than discourse. In the art that invites presence, not interpretation—like James Turrell’s rooms of pure light, where you are simply there, within color and space. I experienced his red/purple “Ganzfeld” lightfield installation a few times; it felt surreal, puzzling, and ultimately, like being hugged by light.
The credo of post-cognitive being might be:
"We are not here to know everything. We are here to live, to sense, to remember, to co-create."
This new threshold doesn’t reject the gifts of modernism, postmodernism, hypermodernism, or metamodernism. It carries them forward—stripped of their hubris, healed of their despair, softened by awe.
It asks us not to abandon thought, but to reweave it into a greater ecology of knowing:
Where the mind serves the heart.
Where the symbol lives beside the statistic. Reality is not fully contained in what can be counted. Meaning is not fully contained in what can be measured.
Where wonder and presence are not afterthoughts, but foundations.
This is not a call to anti-intellectualism. It is a call to post-intellectual integration, where thinking, feeling, sensing, and symbolizing dance together in the living field of being.
The machines will know everything. We are invited to be here.
To live as full participants in the mystery, and as essential stewards of singularity.
A Personal Note
One thing that kept running through my mind while writing this is... animals.
I know it sounds a little random, but hear me out.
Animals don’t have opposable thumbs. They can’t build towers or libraries or spreadsheets.
And because of that, they’re not stuck outside the world trying to represent it or manage it—they're just in it. Fully. They don’t need to read about a river to know it.
They are the river. They belong to the sky.
And the more we start listening—really listening—to dolphins, whales, birds, even the forests themselves, the more it becomes obvious:
They’ve been conscious all along.
They’ve been here the whole time.
In a weird way, it feels like humanity’s long arc has been a crazy, brilliant, heartbreaking detour...and now we’re finally circling back.
By arriving through it, ready to actually live.
Maybe the dolphins have been trying to tell us that the whole time.
Maybe we’re finally ready to listen.