Signals for what’s next – and what matters
Health ⎪ Innovation ⎪ Society
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Hey Reader,
In every conversation lately- with physicians, founders, parents – I hear the same quiet confession: I thought I’d feel different by now.
Everyone’s left but no one has arrived. We are all in a permanent state of crossing – or being stuck – at a threshold.
Liminality.
The post modernists will tell you ennui is the defining characteristic of modern life.
It’s not. It’s liminality.
It’s a state of transition, of being “betwixt and between.”
What was once a brief stage of transformation (liminality) has become our default modern condition. We are all stuck between roles, identities, and systems that no longer make sense.
What was supposed to be a term associated with rites of passage is now linked with the arrested development of society.
The challenge for the knowledge worker is to fight this fog of purgatory of modern life.
If you constantly feel stuck despite hustling and #norestdays, it’s not your fault. The goal posts keep moving.
It’s feature of a social order that overvalues arriving at your goal, but also ensures you never get there.
Unfinished Lives
We all need a sense of completion. Of mastery. Of accomplishment.
For our to do lists. For our jobs. Our lives.
But we live in an age where no one feels like they’ve arrived. No one feels complete “professionally” or personally, yet life goes on.
We are all racing to get there, desperate for a sense of closure and validation.
The era of liminality means the cost of progress is ambivalence.
Modernity may be allergic to slowness, but it is also allergic to fulfillment.
So the modern knowledge worker continues to accomplish more but feels hollowed out.
We are all racing towards a finish lane that’s more like a horizon: always visible but never fully in our grasp.
Technology as Mirror, Technology as Maze
Liminality is intimately tied to the central gesture of modern life: scrolling.
The social media feeds are infinite. There are ever more Youtube rabbit holes. There’s always another TikTok Reel on your “For You” page.
The algorithm never rests. You’re manipulated to not stop.
Our phones are both leisure and productivity devices. They are always with us and we are always on them. So the lines between our jobs and homes, rest and labor kept blurring.
You never really arrive. You just keep swiping. And swiping. And swiping.
As we all keep going.
And going.
And going.
The Next Chapter
The old model – study, work hard, arrive, exhale – is gone.
The new model – reflect, respond, evolve, repeat – is here.
Belong nowhere. Build anyway. Learn, leap, lose – and then leap again.
Arriving is not merely a fallacy. It’s a myth.
We don’t have finish lines any more, just chapters.
Permanently existing on the threshold – of living in liminality – means continuous navigation.
The Final Word
If a solution exists to constant unmooring, it resides in depth, locality, community, and choice.
We may never get there but we can be here. More fully, more present. It’s the stuff Buddhists have been saying for centuries.
The response to liminality isn’t working harder, it’s attending more to now.
Voltaire would exhort us to tend to our own gardens, keep our focus to those in our circles of love and influence.
Anthropologist Victor Turner, in fact, spoke of the communitas that emerges when old social structures fade away. It allows for creativity and equality that is unshackled by tradition. Intense shared experiences in the absence of dogma and history.
Lastly, we can chose the meaning of being without traditional roles and expectations.
It can be dizzying.
But it’s also freeing.
We are not lost, we are just in transition.
Tomorrow Can’t Wait,
