The Quest Express: A Journey to Reconnect Society in the Digital Age

Culture is not just what we create, it's what we are. Intentional communities of artists and thinkers are the guardians of our cultural heritage and the innovators who will shape our future. - Joseph Campbell

It’s time. Grab the passport and overnight bag or fire up the Lear jet.

Rise above the hypnotic Instagram scrolliosis and the urgent to-do lists. It doesn’t matter if you waste 30 minutes or 3 hours a day watching other people live their lives. Society has programmed us into a habit of looking outside of ourselves for answers through screens. So why not replace a Google-laden life with real conversations or a Quest into the unknown in search of our own Holy Grail?

Even if you don’t yet know the question, the answer can still meet you when you travel. Answering the call has a funny way of doing that.

The call to travel outside of your comfort zone – literally and figuratively – isn’t only necessary after the past three years; it’s also an alchemical process of the Hero’s Journey. The process of exiting the known to enter the unknown world is where magic, mystery, and synchronicities reside. “He not busy being born is busy dying,” said Bob. In other words, staying safe in a bubble never summoned much growth or magic.

Haven’t you noticed the odd synchronicities when you travel beyond what’s familiar? If you haven’t, you’re not paying attention.

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. - Ayn Rand

The trends upon us are “revenge travel” and “quiet quitting.” Meanwhile, back at the ranch, people still seem conditioned to tentatively peek their heads out of their huts and hovels and mansions.

Now, the increasingly real threat of WWIII is our scapegoat du jour for succumbing to fear.

What’s been the cumulative result of all the enforced "quiet time"?? A new torrential downpour of human loss, some would call genocide? A divorce? A banana republic? Job changes? A new business built on the back of multiple crises? A fork in the road that forced you to decide to get a little more serious (or perhaps less serious) about your life?

Ideally, we've doubled down on moving freely about the cabin supported by visible courage of our convictions and certainty that comes from principles. Or at the least, we’ve inched closer to living boldly and away from fear.

The problem with being over-entertained and overly distracted by excessive information that floods into our reality day-to-day is that we tend to forget we’re still living. When engaged with cyber screens more time than we’re talking to real humans or being outside, it’s difficult to enter proactive states, because we’re constantly in reactivity. We’re not creating, we’re consuming. Most of us. Much of the time. Too much of the time.

The Love/Hate Affair with Technology

Technology can be a boon to profits, culture, and advancement when used appropriately. Not so much when it uses us. Society has paid a steep price for the “new is better” subterfuge. Are you proactively creating your day, month, season, and year?? Or are you reacting to other people’s lives 80% of the time on autopilot? Are you rarely noticing how often you’re in a constant state of hypervigilance, reacting to ads, posts, tweets, emails, phone calls, DMs, and texts??

What if a forest, a beach, an afternoon, and a communal dinner were all you needed to get answers?

Add a supportive spouse or friend who agrees to the digital detox and you’ve hit the jackpot, perhaps even opening a new doorway to your destiny. Don’t knock it until you try it. Put that mini-TV that you sleep with every night into your underwear drawer, go take your problem to the forest where there is no Wi-Fi, and report back to me with the results (email at the end.)

I’m sure you’ve noticed the increasing mental health issues in our society: shootings, bullying, trolling, body dysmorphia, unelected dictators, bioweapons, and identity politics.

The three greatest perpetrators of our downward spiral into insanity, in my opinion, are:

?1) Normalization of the 9-5 corporate industry and concrete jungle which necessarily severed us from our true nature – being in nature.

?2) The rapid acceleration of screen time; many live behind screens 18 hours a day instead of only 8, which was already appalling. ?

3) Social media which, like it or not, has contributed to the breakdown of many relationships, marriages, and intimacies. Boundaries are more porous and it’s easier to cheat since we’re always facing outward in our bubbles, rather than inward to grow intimacy.

For Some Divorce Was A Goal Not An Accident

And some are, thanks to Jordan Peterson, finally slowly waking up to the extreme damage porn’s infiltration of our culture has caused to destroy the family unit. The statistical correlations don’t lie. And what about Marxist goals such as #40? “Discredit the family. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.” is the 40th goal in the 45 stated goals of the Marxists, according to “The Naked Communist” by W. Cleon Skousen, which entered the congressional record in 1963.

The greedy Machiavellian declarations by unelected world organizations for population culling, near human extinction, in the name of climate change aren’t particularly something to ignore either. The ostrich strategy didn’t work out so well during the Holocaust. Just saying.

Fun Fact

Here’s a fun fact: ?Eight billion people don’t even cover half the surface of New York state in case anyone was curious. We can now go back to having babies and ignoring Gates and Schwab. On second thought, maybe we ought to straighten out the world first. Populating the earth at this juncture would require a Leviathan faith that even the most optimistic may resist.

According to the curious playwright David Mamet who researched the life and death cycles of all civilizations, he found that an obsession with sex is always a common denominator and end symptom of a dying civilization. Gender fluidity and gender confusion are also common in death throes. Check and check.

We’d love to think, as Americans, that we’re the unique and advanced ones who invented cataclysmic debauchery and gender pronouns. ?Unfortunately, we’re only exhibiting all the common symptoms of a civilized culture in the ICU, so there’s nothing new under the sun after all.

The point is not to devolve into black-or-white thinking or doom and gloom, but to confront the fact that our communion with family, society, and the tribe has become raggedy and fractured. Fractured by political overidentification, fractured by dictatorial lockdowns, fractured by virtue of our personal iPhone tech bubbles which Bob Dylan aptly called “weird.”

Even the fractures have fractures, so we desperately need to re-commune and re-thread in thoughtful, and genuine ways.

Technology: Frenemy or Foe?

What if the premise that “technology connects people” ended up being a giant farce and lie? But now that most societies are severely addicted, instead of facing inconvenient truths, we defend our habits to the death like any irrational addict would. Notice that no one is going to technology rehab; I submit that perhaps it is high time we do. At a minimum, we might at least attempt to disrupt our own maladaptive patterns in favor of sanity, proactive reflection, and communion without the numbness and distraction of tech.

Don’t believe technology isolation is a problem? Gary Vee doesn’t. It’s how he built his empire. Of course, it’s a sensitive topic for him and he’ll be the first to defend technology as a messiah.

Do we have any evidence to the contrary?

Let’s look at what’s new or getting worse in our culture. People’s Exhibit A: the state of our youth’s mental health, broken families, video games, body dysmorphia, cosmetic surgery craze, disappearing middle class, high school girls believing they are cats, obesity, and depression. How many calories does a finger swipe burn anyway?

Our connection with our own heart and soul is severed. We’re at the point in civilization where we must exert a great amount of effort just to hear our own hearts and minds. To hear ourselves think. To create in silence. How can there be any hope for a true revolution if we’re all in a tech trance? How do we expect to right any ships when most of society blissfully distracts themselves from everything that’s gone awry? What would Paul Revere do? He seemed rather awake to me…

I’d love for someone to take me back to Paradise City; not where the grass is green and the girls are pretty, and not behind the veil where I'll meet my loved ones; but to that beautiful era in our recent history when we weren’t as distracted. When we slowed down and answered frequent knocks at the door. When we listened to stories at the dinner table with more than a 5-second attention span. When we didn’t lose friends over tribal feuds. When our dopamine hits were a shopping trip or a surprise visitor rather than a ping on our phones.

Instead of suicide by neglect, escape, and over-entertainment (which is where most of Western civilization seems to be heading), what would happen if we shut it all down and began to pay attention at once to what’s really going on? Rather than our drugs of choice: complacency and inaction in the face of invasions and multiple world conflicts. What if we break down the walls of our invisible bubbles and step outside for a minute to get some clarity?

This is step one in Operation Rescue.

Roosevelt Was Right About Fear

Humor me a moment and get out your pen. Whatever you’re scared of, write it all down right now and dare yourself to either do it or do something about it over the next 7-30 days. Set the alert and have someone else hold you accountable for good measure. Commit to a leap out of zombiehood, or your comfort zone, within 30 days.

Maybe you’re only panicked about being without your phone for three days, or you’re afraid to spend two weeks alone in a foreign city. Maybe you’re afraid of wasting time or starting over after a charred relationship, so you overlap and betray the coward’s way. Maybe you’re afraid to have an uncomfortable conversation with your kid, so you don’t due to your waning influence or because you’re not sure what to say and it’s easier to just ignore it hoping it goes away.

Maybe you’re afraid of finding YOU again because you don’t know what that will mean, facing the chaos of unintended consequences, or who you might have to leave behind.

Well, you’re in luck. Because that’s what Quests are for. They’re for confronting fears like Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, or George Washington. They’re for answering that burning question you have or don’t yet have because you can’t hear yourself think.

Quests are for waking up and remembering. They’re for slowing down and reconnecting to your intuition. Quests aren’t solitary. Most voyages are easier with the support of a few humans. Marco Polo needed his father and uncle. Columbus needed the Medicis. Lewis needed Clark.

If We Ever Needed A Holy Grail, It Is Now

How to wake up with a Quest:

1.???? Gather with other humans more than you already are and begin trading pixels for corneas. The Silk Road funded and created the prolific Renaissance period. Corneas were involved and so were uncomfortable steps away from home. Let's model what caused one of the most creative periods in history.

2.???? Define your pivotal Quest, your fork in the road. What is missing or what are you tolerating? What are you in search of? More what? Focus the Quest with an elusive answer or unmet need.

3.???? Go on the Quest. A physical Quest is ideal as it’s symbolic of an inner seeking. The reason this is important is because a departure from home and habits is the easiest way to trade sleepy reactive for superconscious proactive behaviors.

Even if you can only get away for two days, this will be important because then the outer world will match your commitment with the answers you have summoned, and with all of your senses heightened, you’re prone to shut down technology and pay much more attention.

If we don’t like where we’re headed, it’s sheer insanity to continue everything we’ve been doing, which is clearly not enough to heal society or to protect our interests. So perhaps we should try something radically different: unplug and re-commune. Frequently.

The Quest Express Podcast Airs on November 11

If you’re not yet convinced that you’re a part of the solution, you’re invited to hop on The Quest Express, a podcast exploring the Quests of artists, innovators, and entrepreneurs who are doing extraordinary things in strong cultures across the globe. We hope it inspires some personal and professional Quests.

Takeoff is November 11th .? Our first stop is a city that beckons time-travelers: Venice, Italy. We’ll listen to six stories through the lens of Venetians, where we’ll discover their own personal Quests and discuss history, arts, architecture, business, and culture.

On this small, cosmopolitan island on a lagoon, if a child hasn’t walked the same route to school for two days, it’s not uncommon for Venetians to call neighbors out of concern. They only want to know:

“Is Francesca feeling okay? We didn’t see her walk to school today.”

In a place where exhaust fumes are replaced by over 400 walkable bridges, Venice restores, compels, and enchants.

If you’re still not convinced, maybe the Venetians will inspire you to begin your own tech-free Quest, so you might unlock your own answers and stir a creative renaissance.

Join TQE Podcast Community: www.thequestexpress.com/newsletter

Begin Your Next Quest: https://calendly.com/echelon-pinnacle/30min

Reach Out: [email protected]