Some Things Just Need to Be Held
Meta-Modernism and Other Words I Didn’t Learn in Third Grade
For a hot minute, during my third grade year, my recently born-again parents, in a fit of talk-radio-inspired conviction, pulled me out of public school in East Meadow, Long Island, and into the private Catholic one across the street.
My new teacher, Ms. Drake—single, stern, in her 50s—was the kind of woman who I thought always wanted to be a nun, but perhaps never passed her final exam.
The only time I ever saw Ms. Drake smile was when she called on me to answer a certain question. I honestly forget what the question even was, but I do remember my response.
“It depends on what you mean,” I replied earnestly.
Ms. Drake looked down the bridge of her glasses and cracked a smirk.
“You might be a politician one day,” she said.
"Maybe not a politician,” I thought. “Maybe a messaging consultant and media producer who occasionally philosophizes on the Internet!”
While Ms. Drake was off on her prediction, third-grade CJ may have unintentionally been onto something with his innocent non-dualistic answer…as well as his premonition of online-philosophizing...
We are no longer in the age of absolute truth, but neither are we in a void of meaninglessness. Instead, we find ourselves somewhere after. We are in the strange and sacred space where multiple truths can and do cohabitate.
Postmodernism was a scalpel. We now need something that can stitch.
There was a time, long before the Internet, before Sydney Sweeney and her jeans caused an existential crisis, when the dominant cultural story was simple and monolithic: this is what’s true, this is what’s good, this is what’s beautiful. The Enlightenment. Industrial capitalism. American exceptionalism. God, country, family. Each era had its own dogma, but many of those stories hurt people. They erased difference. They silenced contradiction. So postmodernism arrived like a necessary storm, questioning authority, unraveling hierarchies, poking holes in the polished surfaces of cultural certainty.
But the storm didn’t stop. It became the weather. Truth itself was destabilized. Reality, we were told, was subjective. Language was slippery. Power corrupted everything. Certainty was naive. Irony was wisdom. And for a while, that felt like liberation.
Then came the collapse.
When everything is deconstructed, nothing is sacred. When every claim is suspect, cynicism becomes the new faith. When truth is only ever a tool of control, the only thing left is the will to power. And in that vacuum, extremism thrives. Not because people are irrational, but because they’re desperate to believe in something that feels solid.
When we strip away shared meaning, the loudest person fills the silence.
We don’t need a return to absolutes. We need the capacity to hold paradox.
This is why I believe our cultural evolution now requires a kind of post-postmodernism, or what some scholars would call “meta-modernism"—not a return to rigid systems, but a step forward into complexity. Not a single truth to replace the old ones, but the maturity to hold multiple truths at once without collapsing under the weight of the contradiction.
We need non-dual thinking. We need a capacity for paradox. We need the moral muscle to say: This is true, and that is also true. They conflict, and I am still listening.
To be clear, this isn’t moral relativism. There is still a difference between truth and lie, between healing and harm. But what’s different is this: truth no longer comes in clean categories. It comes, instead, in tension. In texture. In competing perspectives that each carry a shard of reality.
Truth is no longer a wall to defend, but a mosaic to piece together.
The alternative is what we’re already seeing: a cultural pendulum swinging wildly between poles. Right and left. Woke and anti-woke. Science and spirit. Logic and feeling. Safety and freedom. Every conversation becomes a battlefield. Every disagreement becomes a betrayal. There is no room for curiosity, only allegiance.
And it’s exhausting.
What if all that exhaustion is actually a clue? What if our fatigue isn’t just the cost of modern life, but a symptom of the fact that our frameworks for truth are too small for the world we now inhabit?
Complexity isn’t a burden. It’s a birthright.
The 21st century is not offering us the luxury of simplicity. Climate change, AI, mass migration, identity politics, spiritual pluralism, economic upheaval—none of these can be addressed with either/or thinking. They demand nuance. They demand contradiction. They demand humility. And more than anything, they demand that we listen longer than when we feel comfortable.
The problem is, we haven’t been trained to do that.
We’ve been trained by algorithms and outrage cycles, by personal brands delivering hot takes, by sermons and slogans, to crave certainty and clarity. But reality doesn’t care about our craving. Reality is a tapestry, not a tweet.
As we discussed in last week’s essay, Clarity is not the same thing as truth. Sometimes the most truthful thing is also the most unresolved.
We are known by our stories.
This is why stories matter. Stories are where characters contradict themselves and we still love them, where tension isn’t a failure of clarity, but the proof of humanity.
It might be why we’re so hungry for meta-modern stories right now…why we find ourselves rooting for Ted Lasso and The Bear when we used to celebrate Walter White and Tony Soprano. Lately, we don’t crave stories for distraction, but for calibration.
So which stories do we want to tell?
If stories shape the age we live in, the question becomes: what kind of story do we tell next?
If modernism believed in progress and postmodernism believed in critique, then meta-modernism, as I imagine it, believes in relationship.
Relationship between ideas. Between perspectives. Between the self and the other. It doesn’t demand that we collapse our differences or choose between them. It asks instead: how can these two things, which seem opposed, help reveal a deeper layer of truth together?
This, to me, is the moral task of our time. Not to argue people into submission, but to model the possibility of holding space for contradiction without panic. Not to abandon discernment, but to wield it with tenderness. Not to reject all categories, but to treat them like maps to explore, not territories to conquer.
To live well now is to accept that reality rarely fits inside a single headline.
We need thinkers who can translate between worlds. We need friends who can sit in the tension without rushing to resolve it. We need teachers who refuse to flatten the human experience into ideological purity. And we need artists who remind us that beauty often lives in the unresolved chord.
I don’t think that means we have to abandon clarity or conviction. But we do need to hold our convictions like open hands, not clenched fists. That kind of skill is only acquired when we summon the courage to steep ourselves in community long enough for it to get weird, feel awkward, and become cramped. To fight the knee-jerk reaction to isolate beneath the warm glow of our tiny screens and instead choose the warm embrace of close quarters.
Meta-modernism is more of a posture than a doctrine.
You don’t learn non-dual thinking from a textbook (although I sure hope for a day when it’s intentionally taught to kids). It comes in the form of proximity. In contradiction. In love. In failure. In watching a person you disagree with still care for their child with tenderness. In realizing the person you admire also carries blind spots. In holding the weight of your own contradictions without turning away.
If meta-modernism is going to work, it won’t be a doctrine. It will have to be a posture. A way of standing in the world with curiosity, not control.
How to be a meta-modern messenger
Set aside the fact that that sounds like a Gilbert & Sullivan song. We know the best messages aren’t always the ones that shout the loudest. But what do they do instead? I’d argue they’re the ones that stay. Stay when the argument quiets down. Stay when the story doesn’t resolve.
The best messages make space...for questions, for contradictions, for the parts of us that don’t line up neatly. They listen for what’s in between, aware that truth rarely travels alone. Instead, it arrives tangled, layered, and unfinished. They don’t always offer closure. What they offer is something rarer: comfort in the complexity.
Not everything needs to be either torn down or tied up neatly.
Some things just need to be held.