Distraction Therapy Podcast – On the Edge of the Signal: Metamodernism and the Emergent Myth of the Now

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There’s a tension humming at the heart of culture today. Not the clang of ideological combat or the tidy dualism of yesterday’s binaries—left and right, true and false, real and fake—but something subtler, stranger. Something that moves not in opposition, but in oscillation. Metamodernism names this motion.

We might once have expected culture to swing like a pendulum—from belief to skepticism, from sincerity to irony, from myth to mechanism and back again. But the pendulum no longer returns. It loops, it flickers, it resonates across registers. The globalised mediasphere—saturated with recycled symbols, memes, rituals, ideologies—no longer insists on a single frame of truth. Instead, it churns. And we, the audience, are learning to live inside the churn.

In this murky middle, postmodernism’s refusal to choose has given way to metamodernism’s compulsion to try. We see creators invoking the grand narratives again—not because they believe them fully, but because they suspect that belief itself is necessary. We see sincerity reborn not in naivety, but in full view of irony’s ruins. And perhaps most significantly, we see a revival of the mythic impulse—not just in the return of old gods in new costumes, but in the very structure of how stories are told, shared, and felt.

This is where Carl Jung’s idea of the transcendent function enters the frame—not as nostalgia for a symbolic past, but as a model for emergent thought. For Jung, the psyche resolves opposition not by choosing sides, but by allowing a third thing to emerge—something new, something irreducible, born not of compromise but of confrontation. It is this process, dialectical and generative, that metamodern culture seems to perform.

Globalised popular culture—through games, music, digital art, and viral folklore—is now a vast arena for such emergence. It holds fragments of the sacred and the cynical, of utopian longing and dystopian shrug. But it is also restless. The energy of dissent—the refusal to remain trapped in irony, the insistence that feeling still matters—fuels the creative impulse toward synthesis. New myths do not replace old ones so much as absorb their power, reconfiguring them to meet the psychic and social demands of the moment.

We are not simply oscillating between sincerity and irony. We are composing something else entirely from the movement between them.

And this is the provocation: if the future of sensemaking is not about settling on the truth, but about opening up the space where truth might become possible again—how do we curate, compose, and care for that space?

Radio Lear does not offer answers. It tunes into the frequency where the next question begins to form.