Lost in the Cosmos

I’ve created a little place on the Internet I call Lost in the Cosmos.¹

It’s a cozy little community for smart, thoughtful people to discuss the world, philosophy, movies, music, religion, politics, anything. It’s a private space and by design it’s invite-only.

It’s intentionally siphoned off away from Social Media and the public square because we have enough of that nonsense. Sometimes you want to sit at the corner booth in a pub and hash out the entire universe over a pint or two. This is like that, but online.

Personally and selfishly, it’s a place for me to surround myself with smart people so I can always be learning and growing.

It isn’t driven by any conscious agenda: not political or religious or philosophical. But those are welcome expressions. If anything I hope to be challenged by diversity of thought and experience. Iron sharpens iron.

Lost in the Cosmos started as a Slack team in the form of chat channels, but I’m realizing it’s better suited to a traditional web forum format. So, I’ve set that up at http://cosmos.pseudomichael.com/¹

I’m writing this to open the doors a little bit. If the above sounds really cool to you, and you’d like to join, please get in touch with me. We are having great conversations, but I don’t think it’s quite reached a critical mass at this point, and some more voices would be welcome additions.

Here’s the original “manifesto” of sorts that I wrote when I originally started the community:

“You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” - Walker Percy

Hello! Welcome to Lost in the Cosmos!

Lost in the Cosmos is a community for critical thinkers in a deranged age. As technology and culture changes how we live and move and breathe and have our being, it’s all too easy to become complacent and submerged in our current age and its assumptions.

I want to explore all manner of modern life through all the useful lenses we have: philosophy, science, religion, myth/narrative, criticism, etc. And I want to do it with other smart people with courage and curiosity.

Practically speaking, Lost in the Cosmos is a discussion group for creative and thoughtful people who feel a pang of recognition at what I’ve written above. We may severely disagree on the causes of various cultural and technology forces, or what they ultimately mean, but the iron sharpening iron is what I crave: constructive and fascinating dialogue amongst people who have alternatives to share in contrast to my own submerged and sunken positions.

Anything may spark a discussion, from daily observations, articles, new developments in science, technology or culture.

Perhaps this is a doomed project but it’s the kind of mental food I crave, and so I want to give it a shot. Part of success is finding a critical mass of enough people to keep conversation flowing. But it also has to be good for us to want to stay. I’d like it to be a semi-private space away from the hyperbole of social media to have deeper discussions.

Too many words here to ultimately say: Please join me so we can be Lost in the Cosmos together!

Lost together,

~Mike

So, what do you say? Do you feel Lost in the Cosmos?

1. This online community was a lovely experiment, first as a private Slack group, and later as a Discourse forum. I eventually had to close it down but there were some valuable conversations had! ↩ ↩²