We are approaching a world that looks very different from the one we currently occupy. The meaning of work is changing, and there is a great deal of uncertainty about what life will look like for most people even in just a few years. Because of this, I think it has never been more important to develop new systems of meaning-making. There are a lot of non-arbitrary parts of society, culture, and the cybernetic apparatus that scaffolds our experience of reality. However, a great deal of it really is just a continuation of something someone threw at the wall which happened to be semiotically sticky. How do we know what we know? How do we take this knowledge, and transmute it into meaning? What systems of meaning can make it through the next dozen years? I don't think anyone has the answer, yet. I don't think anyone really knows what the world is going to look like even next week. But, I think it is a fair bet that there are going to be parts of this world that continue on into the next, and that some of those parts will be systems of meaning-making. You, then, have a responsibility (in my mind) to boldly go out into the unknown regions of the latent space of possible meaning-making systems and chart us a course into a good future. We all have this responsibility, in my opinion, but very few even try. I keep asking myself why that is, and I suspect it has something to do with the pushback that one receives when returning from a journey to the edge. It isn't enough to find one of these new meaning-making systems. Epistemic Explorers and Applied Semioticians can't live in these unprotected waters forever, and need to eventually return home with whatever jewel they've mined on their journey - and they are always eager to have this jewel analyzed, understood, and appreciated for what it is. In the search for legibility, these people often end up giving away parts of themselves to their interlocutor, whose attempt at understanding can become violent. Courageous cartographers who dance at the edge of consensus, dreaming up beautiful systems of thought only loosely connected to the main river, end up cannibalizing their beliefs in an attempt to be understood. There can be a profound sense of loneliness at the edge, and I speak from experience. Some of my favorite ideas were ones I stole from semiotic temples that collapsed when I ran out the back door. This means ending up with gnosis that is extremely difficult to transmit, and when other people try to integrate it into their systems of thought - it either doesn't fit, or it loses its essence in the attempt. The greatest joy, then, for explorers of the frontier is finding people who can take your words at face value, and see the trillion-faced truths underlying the single crystalline outcropping allowed by language. I'm not saying that you should try to transmit only to people who take what you say at face value; quite the opposite, in fact: you need to find people who actually understand you without encouraging you to warp your beliefs. Of course, some beliefs should be warped, and some beliefs are simply wrong. Strong beliefs, loosely held, has always been where I've found the most success. But, some beliefs are load-bearing. When you are in the position of interlocutor, and you encounter someone with a load-bearing belief, it is important to be gentle - especially if it seems that the belief is a fragile one. Some people seek out those who hold fragile load-bearing beliefs, and desire to destroy them. I'm lucky to be in a position where all my load-bearing beliefs are extremely resilient to frame-shifting and Narrative Sliding; I have a very powerful epistemic core that I can rely upon to keep me sane when I am doing my ontological shapeshifting. Not everyone has this. If you lack a solid center, and you do decide to go out into the frontier, you need to be careful. You need to take time after your adventures into the unknown to coalesce your beliefs into something you can defend, otherwise the deductive demagogues will take you for all you've got. I think the exploration is worth it. I think that you don't need to lose something every time you try to translate. But I do think that the process of developing new ways of thinking occasionally warrants telling people that they won't understand for a little while, and that's okay. The world is waking up, and we desperately need new meaning-making systems. It's okay by me if you sound a little nuts while developing yours.