Apocoloptimism

Apocoloptimists are people who maintain a fundamental optimism about life in the face of destruction, chaos, and the crumbling of old paradigms.

Several years ago our friend Lisa Sherman introduced us to the phrase, "apocoloptimism". The word is a portmanteau of the words "apocolypse" and "optimism," two seeming opposites. How does one maintain optimism in the face of apocolypse?

For us, we look at the term apocolypse, not in the popular sense of the literal end of the world, but rather in the original meaning of the greek term, which meant, "revelation" or "an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling." We look at our current global situation as an apocolypse, in the sense that something new is unfolding that we couldn't have predicted. What will be revealed, as the old world passes away? An apocoloptimistic attitude allows us to confront the collapse of the old world with optimism, so that we might incubate the birth of a new planetary culture.

Design Principle: "Good in Heaven, Good in Hell"

One of the core design rules that we derive from the attitude of apocoloptimism is that whatever we design or implement on the Buddhist Geeks Farm must be, "good in heaven, good in hell." In other words, we only do things that have a good chance of working well in the most ideal conditions we could imagine (heaven) and as well as in the worst (hell), because we recognize that we don't know what the future holds.