In my first college year abroad, in-between two am philosophical conversations with my roommates and semiotics assignments, one of the movies that touched me profoundly was Waking Life by Richard Linklater.
More than feeling particularly identified with the main character, what animated me about this art piece was the existential wandering of this earthling who kept realizing that what he thought was waking reality was, in fact, a dream, inside of a dream, and yet another dream… you get the idea.
The trippy ambiance of the movie makes us question whether we can truly know we are not just sleepwalking through what we think of as our waking states. The thing about dreams is that while we're in them, they feel like waking reality.
Having felt such a similar phenomenon - of waking up to a truer reality - at different stages in my life, particularly when I dropped out of college in Porto, interrupting the social script that had been invisibly prescribed to me after nineteen years of numbingly living in the same bubble to study abroad, Waking Youth seemed like an accurate descriptor of my more recent efforts to not fall back into sleep.
As to the Youth part of Waking Youth, as a youngster in my twenties, Waking Youth speaks to the particular experience of the literal youth who is currently transitioning into adult life and facing its "typical" challenges (i.e. getting a decent job, building a career, buying a house, creating a family) to, not long after, realize such pursuits are in a way pointless or silly when we acknowledge the current state of the planet…
(I’m curious to know if you experience this phenomenon or if I’m generalizing a personal experience. Feel free to answer in the comments section or send me an email).
Running the risk of over-stretching a manufactured meaning yet protecting myself from attributing an expiration date to this project's message as I become a fully developed adult, Waking Youth also signifies an intentional initiation of the collective adolescent-like consciousness of the human family into a more mature stage of development.
I first read about this idea in Krista Tippet's work, then in Daniel Pinchbeck's books. If we consider humanity as a single entity, we would be on a developmental stage comparable to that of a human in their early twenties. Sometimes we're incredibly sharp and ingenious. Others, we're plain dumb and immature. What if we turned this into an opportunity for growth?
So, while we are already awake at many levels, much like the guy in Waking Life who becomes aware he is sleeping, the Waking Youth Project represents an invitation to interpret the current planetary crisis as an opportunity to become the "critical yeast" that wakes up from the current collective sleepwalking to discover (and create) a new base reality.
Ok. That's about as meta as I can go without stealing too much of your precious time.
As promised, here's the link to the new podcast trailer. A big thanks (again) to our Music Audio Producer, Carlos Sierra, for the patience and excellent work.
Warmly,
Carlota
P.S. Next month, I'll send you the first episode of Season 2, where I interview my friend Esaú Gozalor about gender and relationships beyond binary thinking
Beautiful Stuff!
Beautiful story! 😍 I've always felt so inspired by the way you started this project - your motivations, your doubts, the way you approached it. Can't wait for season 2 👏