In Winter 2024, I went on a sitting meditation retreat. It was a week of stillness, routine, and letting go of habitual thoughts.
When I was traveling home from the retreat I had a strong sense of wanting to shift my life/work/career from mostly coding by myself toward community, events, and helping people. But I certainly did not know how or in what form.
Then in January, 2025 I read this article: “The Anti-Social Century: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.”
I immediately thought “That. That’s where I want to help.”
The next thing I did was to text some other parents I know, but that I don’t know well, to ask if they’d like to come over for a board game & beer night. Six people came, we talked and laughed a lot, and barely played a couple games. A few of them stayed an hour longer than they first said they could. I was so happy with how that went that I’m trying to make it a regular night. No big deal, no pressure, just an invitation and welcoming environment.
I spoke to my friend Michael Carroll about what he calls “Vajrayana and the 21st Century Paradox.” It is about the paradoxical state of our world, which has the greatest abundance humans likely ever enjoyed, and tremendous, growing suffering. We recorded the conversation as a podcast.
To make some attempt to show just how we experience this abundance and suffering…
- I have a fancy phone that will let me video call with people on the other side of the world.
- An ambulance, essentially a little hospital on wheels, can drive up to you wherever you’re hurt.
- There are AI chat bots that turn my words into numbers, process them through their data, and send back advice as words – but they don’t understand what they sent. And when I read the words that were numbers, the advice seems reasonable. But, I’m talking to nothing.
- Countries around the world are re-arming, and building more nuclear weapons.
This is a confusing time to be alive.
I feel that I’m at the point in my practice where I’m starting to take responsibility for engaging this situation. There’s something Michael says about the world situation we find ourselves in that I like quite a bit “from a Bodhisattva point of view—it’s not a threat. It’s an invitation.”
Listen to our conversation here – the podcast episode is titled “Vajrayana and the 21st Century Paradox with Michael Carroll & Bill Moriarty” on both YouTube, and audio on Libsyn.
For those who like talking about the technical details of these things:
From a technical aspect, I used my Hollyland microphones, and the Insta360 Link 2 camera to record this podcast locally in 1080p. These Hollyland lavalier microphones continue to be my favorite because they are so small and lightweight, easily attach via a backing magnet to someone’s shirt, and sound nearly as good as the Rode wireless mics. They’re also really inexpensive and for some reason I enjoy it more when I get great results from something inexpensive.
I continue to use the Descript built-in feature called studio sound and lower the percentage down from 100% to maybe 60% or 70%. This saves me such an enormous amount of time that would usually be spent on de-noise, reduction, de-reverb, gating. I hope they build in a deeesser soon, but I’m able to use their high pass filter with a little compression and EQ to get this sounding pretty good to my ears very quickly.
This was a community discussion over zoom, and I cut out the audience questions from our audio, we wrote their questions as one or two sentences, and re-recorded them myself. This is because I wanted to respect their privacy by not having their voice on the recording.
I’m getting better at interviewing. I’m squirming less, being much more comfortable with not having a question ready, following the course of the conversation and tossing out my questions, and I don’t find myself at all thinking to head to the next question while someone is talking to me.
I’m being present with the person I asked to come and be interviewed…and isn’t that the whole point of this meditation we can practice?
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