Transcription
[Music] At first, I thought this was all a joke. Wizards in real life, just some people having a laugh, having a good time. I started to realize that this wasn't as simple as I thought. So, I had to dig deep. And what I found is crazy.
This all started a few months ago when I stumbled into the Golden Frog Inn. There I was immediately in love. It was just this repeatable joke about framing your life in this sort of medieval fantasy aesthetic and pretending that you're in this absurd world. And just the whole aesthetic was awesome. I was immediately into it. More and more of these pages just kept popping up for me, and I looked into them and I realized that they were all popping up fairly recently and they were blowing up quick, and I was like, there has got to be something going on here. Like, how did all of this just form and push out this whole momentum?
Slowly but surely, as I kept digging, I eventually was led to a Discord invite. A Discord invite to what I now know was the Discord, the Wizards Discord, and it goes deep. Let me show you some of this. They're organizing quests together. They're sharing art that they've made. They're teaching each other like things that they've recently learned, and they're all sharing the knowledge with one another. They're even making memes. Look at this. They are having a great time. I even made sure to send a few messages of my own. They did not disappoint. Someone even told me to go and check out the philosophy. I was like, the philosophy? They led me right to where all this started.
The wizard's lifestyle was all in writing, defined in a single philosophy written by somebody out there. Let me give you the gist. Basically, they dedicate all of their time and energy to seven main focuses. The first pillar is life as adventure. Basically, they really just emphasize the fact that you need to have your feet moving. You got to be working toward goals and success. You got to treat them all like an adventure where you're going to have obstacles in the way, and you got to just tackle them with an excitement, and you got to approach the world with just this ferocity, and you got to keep moving. The second one is that they try to learn as much as they can along the way. The second being the pursuit of knowledge in their life. They make sure to dedicate time to learning, paying attention, and taking in as much as they possibly can from their surroundings. These first two very simple. I was like, there's nothing too crazy here. But the more this develops, the more I kind of understand what's going on.
The third one is humility and charisma. And basically, they talk about this balance between humility and charisma and that one can't work without the other. It's actually kind of a great idea. They're talking about how too much charisma, you're too loud, you're too—you can be arrogant. People will start to kind of get the wrong idea from you, that you'll start to seem disingenuous, and that when you're humble and you take charisma and you use it for other people and not just for yourself, but you use it to actually have love and you use it for good, then you start to kind of perfect your social poise, and it seems to really be valuing connection.
The fourth one is creativity and craftsmanship. And it's basically talking about how the world has kind of been overtaken with consumable materials. It basically just talks about keeping a balance between what you create and what you consume. And it really emphasizes the fact that you should be making more things for yourself. You should be a creative person. You should have craftsman skills—make more things not only for themselves but for other people. And then when you kind of do that and when you're spending your time doing that one thing and you all start to live in harmony and you create and you share, then it just kind of creates this whole ecosystem of trading and connection.
The fifth one is that they become one with nature, and it's basically just emphasizing the fact that you need to have a healthy relationship with the natural world. It. The line here was, too many people have their feet buried in concrete, stuck under artificial light and taste for food made in factories. And I was like, no one's going to argue with that.
The sixth one they call embracing whimsy. And as soon as I heard that, I was like, okay, now we're really getting into the wizardesque stuff. What other group of people are really using the word whimsy? And I realized that all whimsy really is is being in a good mood. Like, they talk about just practicing whimsy in order to regain control of your emotions and just use the power of positivity to not let things get to you. And I was like, this is kind of awesome.
The seventh one, pretty great one to end off on, is being capable. And it talks about how we're all kind of on different teams here. We all have our own teams, our own groups, and it emphasizes the point that you need to be a useful member of yours. You need to have useful skills. So, you need to be either strong or you need to be the medic, be the knight, be the guard, be the leader, have useful, real skills that are able to help support yourself and the people around you.
I really thought this was all just a meme in itself. I thought this was a joke, and I was like, I don't think I've ever heard of another philosophy I liked more than this one. Like, it's kind of absurdism with this existentialist take on it where you just kind of created this own philosophy, this own purpose, this own meaning. You gave it the title of the wizard, and suddenly you're breathing life into really a good progressive healthy lifestyle.
So yeah, these pillars, they claim to produce real-world magic, is that when you balance each of these seven things and you start to, you know, live with purpose and passion and you become capable and you start to dedicate to learning and you really focus on your mood and being whimsical and all of these things—that is what comes to harmony with real-world magic. The more I dove into this, the more I found myself rooting for the Wizards. I wonder if the guy who started this, like, actually thought that this was going to blow up like this. Like, did he expect people were actually going to all jump on this train? And I—I mean, I'll let you in on a secret. I didn't.
Check out the Discord and the Way of Wonder playlist on the imagination channel. Hope you enjoy. [Music]