I’ve never much felt like I was part of a cultural movement. I’m too much a “digital native” to be fully part of Gen X. I’m insufficiently idealistic to be a Millennial. I’m part of the transhumanist, the rationalist, and the effective altruist subcultures, but in a weak way that more resembles atomization than membership. And my philosophy is one of irreducible complexity. So I was surprised to discover I’m a metamodernist.

In a The Huffington Post piece from January, Seth Abramson describes metamodernism this way:

[M]etamodernism believes in reconstructing things that have been deconstructed with a view toward reestablishing hope and optimism in the midst of a period (the postmodern period) marked by irony, cynicism, and despair.

Generally speaking, metamodernism reconstructs things by joining their opposing elements in an entirely new configuration rather than seeing those elements as being in competition with one another. If postmodernism favored deconstructing wholes and then putting the resulting parts in zero-sum conflict with one another — a process generally referred to as “dialectics” — metamodernism focuses instead on dialogue, collaboration, simultaneity, and “generative paradox” (this last being the idea that combining things which seem impossible to combine is an act of meaningful creation, not anarchic destruction). Metamodernists will often say that they “oscillate” between extremes, which really just means that they move so quickly between two extremes that the way they act incorporates both these two extremes and everything between them. The result is something totally new.