Manifesto #8 / Reinventing Making Connections
Changing the world has to be fun
“Well I got to keep it going keep it going full steam / Too sweet to be sour too nice to be mean / On the tough guy style I’m not too keen / To try to change the world I will plot and scheme.”
~ Adam Yauch, 1964-2012
As social creatures, we’re all wired to connect to people who make us feel good.
The challenge and fun of life is in finding those who we most enjoy spending time with. We know we’ve found them when we laugh uncontrollably, smile easily, breathe easier, and just be ourselves.
Laughter is the original and most effective social glue. Best to experience it early, freely, and often with others, and continue to keep doing so throughout your life.
Let us resolve to joyfully change the world.
We engage in life by talking, touching, transmitting transformative ideas and emotions in real time.
Early in year one of the pandemic, millennia of physical, cultural, social hardwiring put us on pause. Humanity was asked, for its own good to stay away from groups, not be as social, and wait it out, sheltering inside. Even for naturally introverted people, those times weren’t easy.
In just a few months, massive worldwide cultural shifts occurred in the blink of billions of eyes. All of this made it even more necessary to stay connected to those you care about, and to build new connections through technology.
Exchanging ideas is another thing we humans are wired to do. Prior to the pandemic, most of us had already adapted to long-distance technologically communicating.
New ideas and reinvention go hand in hand. Ideas, once formulated travel quickly by texts, video clips, and social media.
Opening a text or a video can lead to opening a mind.
Globally, ideas are transmitted that feel as if they are moving at the speed of light, changing minds in the moment.
In the early twentieth century, people sat around listening to the radio—with songs and stories broadcast across the airwaves creating pictures in their minds. Now, streaming music and podcasts serve a similar purpose. Rewiring our nervous systems while reminding us of who we are in our heart of hearts, sending us songs and sounds that’ll make us feel energized, change our moods, alter our physiology.
Music is the art form that connects heart, mind, and spirit.
How does a particular experience make you feel inside? You don’t decide, you just feel it in less than an eye blink. Art, design, media, culture have merged. We act, or react, because we are drawn toward or pushed away from something. We’re sensing the immediacy of the world at a time when it feels like the planet needs humanity to be changing a decade’s worth of history in a single day.
The planetary change is speeding up, and our minds and bodies are evolving.
When ideas shared between several people connect to others and then coalesce into group knowledge, the culture shifts. Having new ideas accepted has never been easy, but it’s an essential component of shifting cultures forward.
We are knowledge seekers and pattern decoders, always have been. Ingesting new ideas daily rewires your brain.
The world has altered, and a worldwide shift is in process. People are wired into global events, humanist causes, transformative media platforms, and are ready to change the world.
The perfect ideas matter. Slightly imperfect ideas put into motion matter even more. Transformational ideas matter more than ever. Community-altering ideas are vital and necessary. Transmitting ideas at the right time leads to personal, social, cultural reinvention. Great ideas like to hang out with better ideas and improve their game. Inspiring ideas step up and let you know the time is now.
In the New Now, people have the time to think more deeply and write down what a more perfect union, life, future, would look and feel like.
Every type of relationship is a union. For a moment or a lifetime. Think about how you can make more perfect unions, knowing perfection won’t be reached. But it must be reached for.
The most lasting change often arrives from inspired individuals who understand how daily actions overcome deeply embedded cultural reinforcement. Inhaling life-altering truths is essential. Exhaling toxic societal propaganda is a necessary practice, like walking and eating what makes your own body healthier. Building up a greater capacity for creation instead of destruction moves us all toward more fulfilled lives.
Interacting with people who deeply understand you feels good, and so does being around people, events, books, music, that’ll alter your perceptions and open your mind.
Freethinkers will continue to build on the legacy of acceptance that permeates the global culture in this new century. People have been starving (mentally, emotionally, spiritually) for the changes already in progress.
We now rejoin the world we are creating, already in progress.
Open minds are necessary in the Age of Reinvention. People with backwards and intolerant belief systems are going to go the way of the dinosaurs, not in a hundred years, and not in two years. They are already vanishing before our eyes. Open-minded people are creating and letting culture-shifting ideas into their minds and becoming a reinvented version of themselves.
Laughing, connecting, open hearts and minds are the strongest joyful weapons we can use to shift humanity forward.
The New Now
Manifestos, Reinventions & Declarations
Revised & Updated
by
Russell C. Smith
Michael Foster