Today in the age of ________
It’s easy to see in the day2day how people are stuck in hot pursuit of hollow objects. Anyone can get catapulted into startdom, or flex fake racks on a green-screened private jet, or do all sorts of more nefarious things with AI. I'm not even mad at it--can't be mad at where we've met the universe. But the images we're flooded with have long stopped being evidence for what they depict; still, we're carried by the flood. Running on the fumes of extrinsic motivation (chasing things displayed by others) while watching those markers collapse and poof into thin air.
Celebrity (i.e. star status) has gone from isolated territory to accessible, attainable, straight-up reproducible, and now vacuous. This is by noooo means a fresh insight, but a malaise, a disconnect from ambition, occurs at-scale when people realize with time, however deep down, that what they've been chasing will never fulfil their desires. So... why try?
Well, the question is right, if we ignore—or perhaps worse, forget—that intrinsic motivation is possible. Ambition is driven by the things we see (in the media, online, etc.). Lifestar begins at the question of what else ambition could be pointed at.
Lifestar: Make new history
There comes a point where we’re doing too much to combat the feeling that this shit is all fake—it becomes more alluring, sensible, a-natural-thought-produced, to accept that everyone is their own movie.
Lifestar tries to express a way of being that breathes ambition back into desire. We are interested in sparking internal flames while figuring out how to introduce more fun and spontaneity. How can the singular + total be amplified individually, with resonance?
Lifestar is not just about you being your own wellspring, but about creating more friction, collision, and interaction in an increasingly isolating world. The spectacular and the mundane coming together every day. One way to go further on the axes of fun and fulfilment in the lifestar plane is to live on Random Mode: embracing spontaneity, curiosity, and being down for whatever.
To act and create new action instead of slipping into behavior. This is related to the death of the answer. Abandon predictability!
Messages on River
No re-inventing the wheel here, but hey, messages (finally) arrived to the app: a new way to express and connect on River.
Are "core functions" set in place? How many puzzle pieces are there? How many new, or essential, things are there to be introduced? A lot has happened since launch, and it comes back to this sappy point: none of it can be done without y’all.
Beyond the @river_wip instagram and the Feedback channel in-app, you can always respond to these emails if you want to get a thought or a note off.
Every corner of the map
Can’t live life pulled only by north stars. This is how ambition collapses. South stars and a certain amount of hating energy (not to be confused with hate) can’t be outrun.
You work with what you have and you’ve got everything at your fingertips. Face the open sky, and always listen for two things:
- the unintelligible, the idioms, the turns of phrases unfamiliar;
- and the strange, the anomalous
(ask yourself: what is this question im feeling?)
No more living other people’s lives, no more reference-as-motivation. Living to make new history, not just recreate moments.
Lifestar unlocks a path to ambition to make full use of time. Yes to unpredictability, yes to knotted journeys, to the unordinary. Be down for whatever.
Opportunities to stay close
"Some things you come back to again and again, not to improve, but to remember something."
Always thinking about ways to stay close, and of things that you'll want to keep close. Thanks to those who responded to our recent call to engage, and be expecting some mail soon!
Thought spaces itself out into the world...
Keep finding new ways of organizing/sorting experience. Part observer and part agent in all these different records of what things really look like. Place meet person meet symbol, and travel across whatever terrain you find your feet ‼️
