What is a Good Life?

What is a Good Life? #17 - Leaving Utopia with Bayo Akomolafe

May 9, 2023

Bayo Akomolafe, a celebrated speaker and posthumanist thinker, discusses his transformative journey through parenting a son with autism. He challenges the pursuit of idealized utopias, advocating for embracing complexity, bewilderment, and emotional authenticity. The conversation highlights the nuances of identity, the chaos within societal norms, and the importance of recognizing interconnectedness. Bayo emphasizes cultivating wonder as a means to tackle global challenges, urging listeners to appreciate life's fluidity and the richness of human experiences.

01:04:01

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Bayo Akomolafe

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Quick takeaways

Bayo Akomolafe emphasizes the importance of continuous inquiry over seeking final answers, encouraging exploration beyond established boundaries to foster creativity.

The conversation highlights how cultivating a sense of bewilderment can disrupt conventional problem-solving methods and enable genuine transformation in understanding solutions.

Through his experiences with his son, Bayo illustrates that wisdom can emerge from diverse perspectives, reshaping our connections with reality and knowledge.

Deep dives

The Quest for Individual Understanding

The discussion revolves around the journey of exploring what constitutes a good life, emphasizing that it is an individual quest rather than a universal standard. The host has engaged with over 150 voices to gather diverse perspectives, allowing listeners to derive their own interpretations. This approach aims not to provide the 'right' answer but to inspire reflection on personal definitions of fulfillment. Such a method underlines the richness of human experience and the various paths individuals can take toward understanding their existence.

Intro

2min

Exploring Utopia and Emotional Complexity

16min

Exploring the Intersection of the Monster and Human Identity

4min

Embracing Complexity: Growth through Acceptance

25min

Embracing Interconnectedness and Bewilderment

11min

Embracing the Fluidity of Life and Death

6min

On the 17th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast I am joined by Bayo Akomolafe, who is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, professor, public intellectual, essayist, and author.

Bayo is the Founder of The Emergence Network, he currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, and the University of Vermont, and was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of the University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also been appointed Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany.

In this episode, Bayo shares with us his journey of moving beyond the confines of final statements, final destinations, and boundaries, to an ongoing emergence, or flow. This conversation delves into the abstract, the philosophical, and the practical, as well as Bayo’s personal experiences of what his son with Autism is teaching him about wisdom.

We discuss the importance of cultivating bewilderment, wonder and inquiry, and disrupting the logic of continuity, for new ideas and solutions to emerge - to break the cycle of problems and solutions feeding each other. This episode will challenge your thinking and perhaps inspire you to new ways of problem solving and understanding, while it may also require you to listen with more than your ears and your mind.

Subscribe for weekly episodes, every Tuesday, and check out my YouTube channel (link below) for daily clips and reflections.

Running Order:

01:44 Podcast begins

02:42 Is there pain in Heaven?

05:12 Is there another colour?

08:02 A problem with a "perfect" city

12:44 Creating the space for observing the emergent

17:13 The role of the monster / questioning stability

21:36 Holding fixed views when everything is in flux

23:29 There isn’t an originary point to return to

31:44 His son becomes his teacher and coach

40:14 Shifting perspectives to navigate the world

42:59 Communicating from a different dimension of thought

45:39 Rejecting walls

49:17 What’s more than a solution?

55:04 What’s required beyond information?

59:09 What is a good life for Bayo?

For further content and information check out the following:

- For the podcast's YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/@whatisagoodlife/videos

- My newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/

- My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/

- Bayo's Website: https://www.emergencenetwork.org/

- Bayo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bayoakomolafe/

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