More beauty is possible with intergenerational proximity and cultural continuity.

Such spontaneous practices were once common, both fractally within a culture, and even between neighboring cultures.

These practices helped orient us beyond the immanent, and for millennia informed our sense of embodied meaning.

Yet their loss doesn’t show up on any analytic index of human “progress”.

Instead, we track the cost reduction and availability of SSRIs, and assemble Happiness Indices based on how many Twinkies you can buy with one standard ration of Monopoly money.

And you wonder why so many Westerners feel hollowed out?

That these few holdouts can produce such awe-inspiring beauty on-demand, with nothing but their minds and their voices, while standing on the ashes of the material wealth to which so many have enslaved their Being, offers us a clue…