Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate
We will now enter two weeks of deep rest, but first, per tradition: 2024’s Oblique Strategies power ranking. (Previously: 2022, 2023.)
10. Do something boring
We do a lot of boring things life, don’t we? I spent six months fighting my mortgage provider, correctly, because of a mistake that they chose to make. None of that ended up here in text, because there was no reason to discuss it, remains no reason to discuss it. What even to say? They screwed up and I spent 21 phone calls about it. They came correct after I threw my lawyers at them, as children tend to do.
We spend most of our lives inside ourselves, commuting places, keeping our heads down, being relatively quotidian. Exceptions are rare. I am not one of them.
9. Disconnect from desire
The classic Buddhist idea that desire is suffering hits rather different when the collective has found itself in an eternal apocalypse largely of its own making.
8. Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities
No strategy should be articulable anymore. Imagine sharing your playbook with literally anyone. Imagine being fully authentic about your spoken intentions in 2025. The mind reels. One exists in silence and moves. We will all move how we move. The goal is to witness, silently, and reflect, also silently.
7. Cut a vital connection
On the one hand, we trim like it’s a bonsai tree. On the other, I’m pretty tired of it.
6. Use an old idea
There are only old ideas now, aren’t there? We relearn what drives us on a soul level, come back to it, come back to ourselves, look at whatever this is, and are thusly empowered to move.
5. Question the heroic approach
The idea of a “hero,” really. Heroes are chosen, an external decision, out of your control. Inner-wise, one believes they’re on their own journey, main character energy, their first lover, and this all is both true & not true.
Perhaps it’s better to view one’s self as not-victim, and to think less about the contrapositive. You are not a hero or a victim, you are a self that remains in continual evolution.
4. Don’t be frightened to display your talents
Gosh, the amount of self-diminishment that I did for a few years there. Came out with the book and instantly ran into a bunch of weird personal stuff that threw me off my game for a long time.
It took years of healing for me to realize that I am in fact a good person and don’t need to apologize for who I am, what I do, or how I do it. It was brutal. There was no shortcut. Eventually I realized how much was out of balance in the collective, how incorrect individualism had seized the precepts of right relationship and corroded relational structure.
I suppose now we’re all in the find-out phase, no?
3. Use filters
Last month, I deleted 1,800 people from my address book and blocked all unknown numbers. You now need three separate references just to get inside of my house.
2. What wouldn’t you do?
What happens when trust is dead? What happens when the only rules are the ones that we make between each other? What happens when our existing structures complete their slow collapse?
1. Discard an axiom
In math, axioms are the foundation by which we build everything. Euclidean geometry is based on five axioms. Calculus can be built from thirteen. Axioms, then, are considered to be load-bearing, non-optional, impossible to swap. Discard one and you end up with a whole new system of understanding, a way of relating that doesn’t feel right.
We keep discarding the assumptions that have underpinned our world. We are all now a hive mind, with access to materially similar sets of information, and we react instantly to all of it. What then?