Become Your Neighborhood Wizard 🧙♂️
Field Notes from the Future | 007
At the beginning of the 2020s we were taken on an unplanned and involuntary journey into the future. I’ve been taking notes. Let’s get equipped.
It’s a scary world out there nowadays. You can’t tell who to trust, it seems like chaos is growing by the day, normal people everywhere act in increasingly abnormal ways. We seem to live in a period where our leaders exist in a parallel world gradually receding from ours, unable or unwilling to bridge the gap to our reality. Many have spent the past few decades loudly waiting for some figure of authority to step in and sort this mess out. It seems we will continue to wait for the king or the president or the board director to appear. In the meantime, the needs grow by the day. Real, pressing, agonizing, the breaking apart of modernity continues its steady drudge. Most people will accept the state of things with a shrug. Some might busily organize relatively useless efforts to bring history back a few minutes at the cosmic scale. But hidden in plain sight are just a very few who can see beyond the present moment, who know the way to follow. The age of middle managers is passing away. It is time for the return of the wizards.
You’ve probably met these people before. If even our living room can become a Thin Place where we confront the reality of the spiritual world, people are certainly able to be those confrontational points of origin. Acting as beacons in the dark, walking archives of mysterious wisdom, they are people who always seem to be slightly both beyond your current location and hyperpresent in it simultaneously. Interacting with these people is educating, destabilizing and invigorating. They leave you convinced that you cannot stay as you are, but also leave behind some tool or token that assist you to change. While our modern spirit endlessly parrots the same complaints, a wizard follows an eccentric orbit of action. They are often deceptively normal until they reveal themselves to be confrontationally out of step with their age. These are the mentors that you continually seek out for guidance, the gimlet-eyed grandparent who seems to have a tested solution to every problem. Wizards are not theoreticians, but spiritual tacticians. Out of a deep kindness and concern for others, they devote themselves to arming those around them with wondrous things.
Of course the literary examples abound, but they are just attempts at descriptions of real humanity. Contrary to Jung, real life doesn’t happen because it is portrayed frequently in art. I’m less interested in archetypes and symbols than in flesh and blood. And I think that every community needs a few of these individuals, ready to offer their eclectic collection of knowledge. We’ve outsourced so much of our learning and information storage to others that we forget the value of human guides and teachers until we desperately need one. And one of these individuals is capable of serving many people. Not everyone needs to be a Solidity developer or a literary scholar or a pastor, but one of those can serve the specific needs of thousands. I’m going to assume, since you’re spending your Monday afternoon reading obscure Substack essays on the nexus between Christianity and technology, that you’re already the sort of person who suspects this might be precisely your calling. What if normal isn’t so much for you? What kind of special, what form of unique, should you be offering as your gift to others?
I. Accept the Mantle
Constant worry about what the technocrats and bureaucrats are up to is telling on ourselves. We are displaying our true belief that we are powerless to accomplish majestic things without the permission and backing of the Establishment. You can sit passively and pass judgment on the products that They hand you to consume, but a wizard retreats to the hedges and byways to make a hidden world. Wizards blow through the village with their cloak flapping, dispensing impossible magic in their wake, disappearing with a chuckle. You should expect to be the fount of technical advice, the source of career wisdom, the first resort of “I have a question” and “would you pray for me.” It’s your job, after all. You have to be the sputtering, preposterous engine that fills everyone else with the energy to do things they really shouldn’t be attempting in the first place. You have to say less so that you’re listened to when you choose to speak. When Gandalf appears in a shower of sparks amid mortal danger, his presence makes the hobbits and dwarves feel safe. He does not allow understandable panic at the wraiths and goblins in the darkness to fill him with visible dread. The light burning in the wizard’s eye is the light of faith, born of experimental experience. They’re not scared because they’ve been here before. If you accept this calling, be prepared to live a life constantly passing through the apparently solid walls of the “real world,” inviting others to follow.
II. Master Your Craft
There are many types and specialties of wizards, but they are all able to do marvelous things. While most can be content with getting their credit card to work with the chip reader, wizards are running ETH fullnodes and spinning up Urbit moons. Because you never know what those you are called to protect might need someday. It’s not enough to be an abstract specialist, some must be generalist practitioners. Many are capable of iterating on others’ work or duplicating their mastery, but this presupposes the work of some who press “closer to the metal” and ensure a foundation for their community to build on. In a trustless society, being a wizard means being a point of trust. What is your craft? And are you committed to spending your life burrowing so far into its inner workings, living and breathing it so that others can harvest your hard-won arcana? This becomes especially pertinent in the technological realm, as increasingly the only wizards in evidence are bought up as company spellslingers and locked away from the public in glass towers. It doesn’t take a paranoiac to realize the dangers of simple abstracted wielding of the prepackaged technological wand you can buy off the shelf. Shouldn’t someone we can trust know how it really works, so we can make it work for us? Why shouldn’t that someone be you?
You’ll have to go beyond the advice of shovelblogs and Twitter threads, where search engines can’t give you the researched solution in a single query. You are building inside of yourself an indexed human library of experience that will allow you to cross-reference against real situations and return leaps of understanding no language model could replicate. You need to be able to perform the alchemy that distills decades of learning into the hardened gems that will enrich the next seeker’s path at the start. Work until you are unable to be duplicated, and then give yourself away for free to anyone wise enough to listen. In a world of blistering logic and unmatched production, you have to be magical.
III. Forsake Polish, Embrace Substance
Which would you rather have, in all honesty? To be known true or to be well-known, to be rich or to be righteous? Because this will be the choice you face if you don the wizard’s battered hat. One of the many genius elements of Tolkien’s stories is the ridicule that Gandalf and Radagast endure precisely because they are field practitioners rather than tower contemplatives. If you seek the authorized seal of officialdom, the validation of audience approval and the safety of brand-name recognition, then this path is not for you. If you cannot abide creating great things but must also have the look and feel of greatness, you may find to your disappointment the bland pretension of much that is wrapped in acceptable levels of glitz and novelty. Get more comfortable with self-published. Look past album art and listen for artistry. Develop an ungovernable ability to believe what is true regardless of the truth’s public repute.
Wizards don’t produce easily recognized city-and-town greatness, but wild undeniable feats hidden in wilderness corners. And that’s not an excuse for just being an unpopular hack. The proof will literally out when you let go of all the facades that protect you from doing the actual work. Wizards don’t discuss theories, they duel. Elijah built two altars and waited for God’s fire to show who was the genuine article. If you want to see how powerful you could become, why not put yourself in enough danger that only actual manifestations of electrifying greatness can save you?
As usual, you can probably tell that I’ve mostly repurposed spiritual advice to the ends of a secular problem. But you can’t exactly blame me. Since I believe that nothing is purely profane, I’m merely accepting the spiritual nature of all callings. You could do a lot worse than starting out by imitating the wisest and best people I know. The beauty of following a wizard around is that you will quickly see whether their advice is any good or not. Plug it in, run the code. Test the formula and examine the results. There is no corporate consultancy to hide behind when you dispense this kind of point-blank wisdom. You’re going to find out pretty quickly whether you have any magical blood in your veins. Operating your life as an open-source library of priceless wisdom demands that you collect actual wisdom and that you become truly open-source, vulnerable to examination and correction. This is the way of fellowship. Store up your energy so that others can benefit from the dynamo of power you have built. Unlimited resources are available, but no one seems to know where to look.
I’ll see you in the Future.
Travelers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. ‘Strider’ I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
There was a little city with few men in it, and a great king came against it and besieged it, building great siegeworks against it. But there was found in it a poor, wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man. But I say that wisdom is better than might, though the poor man's wisdom is despised and his words are not heard. ~ Ecclesiastes 9:14-16
The timing of your writing corresponds to that of my “career change”. But I neither thought of wizards, nor saw that you had put the call into words till now, more than a year later.
Fun!!
(My hat is different, though.)
When you use the weeds, spread their seeds.
Enjoyable
As always