💖 3 Delulu Takes Going Into September

What is The Nursery?

A curated selection of works on Zora, including diagrams, guidebooks, frameworks, art, essays, and case studies from Scouts on the topics of:

• Branding

• Internet Adventures

• Community Culture and Onchain Third Spaces

• Identity and Nurturing The Self

The Nursery builds the elements that form this vibrant forest, taking the collector from:

Protocol → Community → Channel → Self

Roots → Trunk → Branch → Leaf

As Scouts, we are explorers, adventurers, and observers. It is our mission to craft these onchain narratives that breathe life into our shared spaces and take us into the Clouds ☁️ 

Want to be part of this collection? This is your chance to have your work featured early as we grow into an onchain Scouting organization. Anyone with 3+ newsletter Bookmarks 🪩 or a Cloud Scouts Badge can submit to The Nursery! The collection will likely be free mints or a small fee, but the creator rewards earned go to the artist/writer.

Expansive Communities is minted as a 15-page PDF including extra details and visualizations, the first of the series to live in The Nursery. 🪴

Scattered Thoughts of the Week

I don’t have a big essay this week, but I do want to reflect on some things I’ve been learning and thinking about recently that will likely lead to future writing or talks.

I don’t know if this is how you are, but I quite literally spend nearly every waking moment learning. Let me know your thoughts, I’m sure I’ll come back to these takes and expand on them later.

Ancient Delulu

I’ve been thinking about consciousness and the ways digital leaders often relate to their interactions with technology and ego in this very spiritual way. I find it incredibly fascinating that this need for service through technology facilitates community, peace, stewardship, and simplicity.

Like recently, I was listening to Jesse Pollak from Base talk on several podcasts about his origins in the Quaker religion. Though I was raised Methodist, I deeply resonate with this thread he wrote back in 2021.

While I’m no longer religious in the same ways I was as a teen, I think a lot of those values, the same as Jesse’s, stick with me today. Similar values to why I wanted to create the first onchain Scouting organization, minus the worship of God. I’ve recently been talking to a lot of former Scouts in web3 who find Cloud Scouts very interesting and a way to bring more values-aligned spaces to the forefront of onchain community.

I believe builders, especially ones working to bring culture and connection onchain feel a responsibility, a duty, to these values.

I also recently re-read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Yale and Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian, and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes.

According to Jaynes, the bicameral mind is:

1. The “Executive” Chamber: This part of the mind was responsible for decision-making and problem-solving. It provided guidance and instructions to the individual.

2. The “Analog” Chamber: This chamber was responsible for processing sensory information and emotions. It acted as a receiver for commands from the “Executive” chamber.

This led to ancient people's navigating important decisions through the external voice of “God” or deities. The breakdown of this form of consciousness through social evolution of culture and language meant we no longer had a need for this and led to a unified consciousness.

Though I don’t believe God has ever spoken to me the way Jaynes describes, and while this theory is still quite controversial, it is increasingly confirmed by modern neuroscience.

I do feel I’ve had several deeply spiritual moments throughout my life in various stages, but neither of them was in the same way the church felt I should experience them, which was confusing at the time.

I'm curious about what this means for the future Quantum Internet to experience ourselves. May we see another evolution of consciousness?

Loneliness and Friendship

This week, as I was watching YouTube video essays as I do every week, the algorithm decided to throw me a few on friendship and loneliness.

I’ve talked about it before, but from like 4th grade to a few years out of high school, I had one best friend. We were absolutely inseparable.

We coordinated classes with each other, we did school projects together, we were in the same bowling league, we started 3 newspapers. I was at his house almost every day playing video games. We even filmed this hilarious Senior lit video project on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Unfortunately, we lost touch once he went off to college and moved to different cities, but the point is, since then, I haven’t had a friendship like that.

Making friends, especially close online friends, is really really tough as an adult. It is even more difficult when you consider that in order to make friends that you can actually hang out with in person, you have to have transportation or live in a walkable city, and everything you do costs a ton.

For most of my life, I had this deep desire for company with many fleeting partners and distant friendships that weren’t deep in nature, all of which made me feel even more lonely than alone in the end.

Now, I’m much more comfortable being alone though I do very much love my friends and feel I have deep relationships with many people I’ve met over the past couple of years. Likely the result of growing older and more self-aware of my capacity to be with myself. It’s helped me grow a ton.

Here are a few of the pieces I watched on this topic, you’ll probably find them interesting too:

“I have no friends” - and why it’s okay - by Via Li

the friendship recession - by Dustin Vuong

Nowhere to Go: The Loss of Third Places by Elliot Sang

PR and Modern Delulu

Kyla Scanlon’s video from this week is a MUST-watch. She talks about this documentary called The Century of The Self which I’ve only watched half of so far (it’s 4 hours long) but is entirely fascinating. Obviously, this is far from my final thoughts on Modern Delulu, but we’ll start here and pick this up another time.

A few things I got from this:

In the crypto space, I use consumer products every day, like my Ledger Nano X, MetaMask, Rainbow Wallet, Interface, Mirror, etc. I don’t think any one product has yet to capture the power that Edward Bernays was able to. While I obviously don’t want or believe consumers want to be manipulated, (good) PR is severely lacking in this space. Onchain Summer by Base & Jesse Pollak is a great example of good PR imo.

We’re still trying to figure out how to market the values, virtues, and usefulness of crypto and its various products and services offered.

We have a duty to make consumer crypto more personal, not just through identity measures but to offer ways that users actually find a use more compelling than only the financial but also a need for emotional uses. We also need to abstract the tech to make it a lot easier for the average person to use and see value in.

Think about it, the average person isn't writing HTML or coding Java every day. They just use Facebook or Instagram and have fun scrolling through memes, why should everything be so complicated? The average person doesn't need to or want to read docs or learn coding just to mint their art on their own contract.

Because software is so easy to write and produce these days, especially with AI and no-code tools…and because every “creator” is on their chosen platform telling others how to be a creator or make more $$$ (all tired, repetitive & boring)… we lose out on a lot of the beauty we’re surrounded by.

So to tie this issue together, we must define ourselves not by the brands but by serendipity, love, community, care, and our reverence for humans.

Also, read Life After Lifestyle - by Toby Shorin

Additional sources:

Western Individualism and the Psychological Wellbeing of Young People: A Systematic Review of Their Associations

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