2026 Manifesto

I ‘m Taking a Year to Feel More Alive

In 2026, I am stepping out of the productivity maze. I am refusing the constant demand to justify my existence with outcomes, credentials, optimization, or market value.

Instead, I am running a subversive experiment:

What happens when aliveness is prioritized as the organizing principle of a life?

What I Know

Life force is real.

I don’t need to prove it. I feel it — in my breath, my desire, my grief, my curiosity, my full-bodied yes.

Aliveness is not a luxury, a reward, or a midlife crisis.

It is a basic human capacity that has been tightly managed, manipulated, and maligned — often in the name of safety, productivity, or virtue.

I have felt the cost of this myself.

How I Know What I Know

Joy, pleasure, curiosity, grief, rage, awe, and belonging are not after-effects.

They are how experience and meaning register in a living human system.

If something has no felt resonance — no shift in breath, no spark, no ache — I am not convinced of its truth.

Aliveness is a valid metric.

Not the only one — but one I was trained to ignore.

I am learning to ask not only: Is this logical? Is this defensible? but also Does this enliven me? Does it open me — or shrink me?

Intellectual rigor and embodiment are not enemies.

My brain is a sensual organ. Thinking is one of the ways my life force moves.

I am no longer interested in frameworks that ask me to subdue my vitality to be taken seriously.

What I Trust about the Process

I trust generativity more than closure.

I am done forcing premature conclusions — or products — just to feel safe, legible, or complete.

I trust that meaning emerges through making.

I do not need to know what something is before I begin.

Writing, theorizing, crafting, gardening, discussing, collaborating — these are ways I think and metabolize experience.

I trust that aliveness requires excavation.

I am willing to meet the parts of me that learned to comply or shut down — and to integrate them, not banish them.

(Shadow is not the opposite of aliveness. It is often aliveness that had nowhere safe to go.)

What I’m Actually Doing This Year

I am actively participating in life force — across multiple currents:

embodied * relational * generative * communal * imaginal * ecological * collective / systemic

I will not optimize this. I will not monetize it. I will not turn it into a five-step program.

I will show up, pay attention, and let myself be changed.

If I unearth or make something I want to share, I will. If not, I will still have lived it.

Methods of a Recovering Academic

I will engage my body, mind, and soul — communing with nature, dancing, relating with others, making things, connecting with humanity’s collective historical and imaginal currents, and feeling all the feelings without apology.

I will enter fields — communities, gatherings, experiments in collective life — not as an extractor of insight, but as an engaged participant committed to ethical relating, co-creating, and shared perception.

I will explore meaning — through writing fragments, collages, half-baked theory, mythic imaginings, napkin doodles, chalkboard drawings, and lovely unfinished things.

If something feels dead, I will stop. If something feels alive, I will follow it.

This is not flightiness. This is discernment. (What a concept.)

What I Am Not Promising

Summary reports of my progress
An easy cocktail-party explanation
A comprehensive theory of aliveness
A finished book or other polished deliverable
A monetizable outcome

If something emerges, great. If not, also great. The point is participation, not production.

The Political Part (Yes, There Is One)

A world shaped by patriarchal, capitalist, conservative moral logic depends on people being:

numb
exhausted
disconnected from pleasure
suspicious of emotions (especially the extremes of grief and joy)
loyal to restraint and routine
afraid of their own vitality

Choosing aliveness — openly, playfully, collectively — is not neutral.

It is an act of resistance.

An Invitation (Optional)

You don’t have to do what I’m doing. But you might notice:

where your life force drains out
where it’s dammed up
where it surges
where it flickers when you least expect it

If you feel resonance — follow that. If you feel resistance — interesting. If you feel nothing — also interesting.

I’ll be over here, playing with the question:

What does it mean to live as if aliveness matters?

Fine Print (Subject to Revision)

This manifesto may change.
I may contradict myself.
I reserve the right to take joy seriously.
I reserve the right to do nothing.

This is not a retreat from the world. It’s a deeper (re)entry.

And yes — I think it’s worth a try.