Community Call with Brendan Graham Dempsey

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Acceptance

• Community call hosted and recorded ✅ Recording is here
• Uploaded to Youtube and blog post ✅ https://lifeitself.org/blog/2023/06/11/emergentism-a-philosophy-of-complexity-and-meaning-with-brendan-graham-dempsey

Tasks

Pre-event

• Confirm speaker
• Collect and confirm details
  • Contact for speaker
  • Time
  • Date
  • Blurb for speaker
  • Profile picture
  • Confirm who is hosting/mcing
  • Add to CRM CRM + Network Database - Life Itself
• Create Canva graphic using template
• Create registration using Zoom
• Create the blog post
  • Include image, registration link, biography of speaker or description of the event
• Promotion
  • Emails
    • Initial announcement (main group)
    • Day before announcement (main group) ❌ feels too close to the last email
    • Email reminder (recipients)
    • Plus in newsletter (if applicable) ❌
  • Whatsapp
    • Initial announcement
    • 3 days before
    • Day before
    • 1-2 hours
  • Twitter
    • Thread for initial announcement
    • 3 days
    • Day before
  • Instagram
    • Stories
      • Story template or resharing post
      • Initial
      • 3 days before
      • Day before
  • Post for initial announcement

Post-event

• Make the youtube video
• Update original blog post with youtube video plus information
• Title: Should include name of person, plus keywords/topic
• Announce recording on Whatsapp, Newsletter at end of month, Twitter and Instagram
• Update CRM with links etc.
• Let the speaker know and make it easily shareable

Write up

Our next community call is on Wednesday the 14th June, 7:30pm CET

Register Here https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwufu6grjIjG90coI94j-nlbNw4boNoROsJ

We are delighted to invite Brendan Graham Dempsey to join us for our next community call.

Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He earned his BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and his MA in Religion and the Arts from Yale University.

In his recent work, Emergentism, Brendan opens with the following:

"Why do I exist? Where are we going? What’s it all about?

For a growing number of people today, these existential questions are only convincingly met with admittedly bleak and depressing answers:

No good reason. Nowhere in particular. Nothing, really.

More and more, people feel life matters less and less. A 2019 survey from the UK, for instance, found that a whopping 80% of people there believe their lives are meaningless. That number rises to almost 90% for younger respondents (ages 16 to 29).

Such figures go hand in hand with similar data detailing our exploding mental health crisis. Depression and anxiety are skyrocketing (again, especially among younger folks). Self-harm and suicide are at epidemic levels. Today, we lose more people to despair than to natural disasters, conflicts, and war—combined. For the first time in human history, you, reader, are more likely to die due to the emptiness in your heart than the emptiness in your stomach.

It seems then, one could say, that it is not the external world that threatens us now so much as the internal one. What we believe, or don’t believe; how we think and feel; what we aspire to, or not—these have become more powerful forces determining our destiny than food, fire, and shelter. Certain worldviews are bad for your health, it seems—and the dominant ones are proving downright pathological."

The work continues to dive into the meaning crisis and into the praxis of navigating the meaning crisis. In this latest community call we will dive into deeper discussion around the conversation of navigating the meaning crisis.

To learn more about Brendan and his work you can visit his website https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/

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FIXED - 20 people attend this discussion and the blog post is here - https://lifeitself.org/blog/2023/06/11/emergentism-a-philosophy-of-complexity-and-meaning-with-brendan-graham-dempsey