By Jay Topp
Holy Participation
Hey friend,
Over the course of my life and business journey, I’ve gone through a great number of “stages.” By stages, I mean orientations toward life itself. Different ways I’ve inhabited life while, on the surface, doing essentially the same things: scaling coaching businesses with books, living a global life, creating art along the way.
The actions have often remained similar. But the orientation underneath them has changed completely. And because of that, the experience of my life—and the results—have changed with it.
I don’t think these stages are particularly unique to me. I suspect they mirror something humanity has been moving through collectively for hundreds of years.
And where all of this eventually leads is toward a concept I’ve started calling:
Holy Participation.
An orientation toward life. A way of inhabiting it.
You could reduce it to “enjoying the journey,” but I think that strips it of nearly all its depth. Because holy participation is something much more radical.
1. Modernism
This story begins, at least for me, with something resembling the modernist perspective.
Modernism emerged from a world in which truth had largely been received through inherited authority: the Church, scripture, tradition, the priest, the king. Then came the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. And humanity developed an extraordinary new confidence:
Truth was ours to discover.
The universe could be investigated. Disease could be understood. Nature could be measured. Governments could be redesigned. Civilization could progress.
There were truths out there, and through reason, observation and science, we possessed the means to discover them. There was right and wrong. There was progress and regression. There was an objective reality against which our beliefs could be tested.
And this orientation created extraordinary things. It sent us to the moon. It cured diseases. It transformed the material conditions of human life.
The modernist orientation was, fundamentally: There is truth. There is a right answer. And if we work hard enough, we can find it.
I recognize this orientation deeply in myself.
There is a correct way to build the business. A correct strategy. A correct life. A correct destination.
Figure it out. Execute. Progress. Win.
2. Postmodernism
Then came the great age of deconstruction.
Postmodernism looked at the confidence of modernism and asked: Whose truth? Whose definition of progress? Whose morality? Whose history? Whose idea of success?
The great foundations began to shake. Religion. Government. Institutions. Ideology. Identity. Capitalism. Progress itself.
Things that had presented themselves as universal truths were revealed to have perspectives embedded within them. Meaning itself could be examined as something constructed.
This is postmodernism’s great gift. It liberates us from unconscious certainty. It teaches us that the map is not the territory.
But there is a danger hiding inside this freedom. Because eventually you can deconstruct the ground beneath your own feet.
If every value can be questioned, every identity constructed, every institution compromised and every story dismantled—what remains?
Nothing appears pure enough to believe in. No mission survives interrogation. No value feels completely objective.
And waiting underneath it all is nihilism. Meaninglessness. Contempt. Irony. The strange paralysis of becoming so intelligent about the construction of the game that you forget how to play it.
3. Metamodernism
And now, I believe, we are beginning to see another orientation emerging from the ashes of that nihilism. Something like metamodernism.
It does not return innocently to modernism. We cannot simply forget everything we learned.
We know our stories are stories. We know our identities are constructed. We know our institutions are imperfect. We know our values cannot necessarily be proven from first principles. We know there may be no universal, preordained purpose waiting in the cosmos for us to discover.
And yet…
We choose anyway.
Perhaps the universe is silent on meaning. So I will create my own.
This is not an easy transition. It is easy to slide backward into nihilism—to laugh at your own sincerity before somebody else gets the chance, to refuse to believe deeply in anything because you can already see the arguments against it.
But if that threshold can be crossed, something extraordinary becomes possible.
Permission. Expression. Creation.
You stop waiting for the universe to hand you your purpose and begin authoring one. You take the raw material of your existence—your pain, desires, relationships, talents, obsessions, contradictions—and forge meaning from it. The crisis of freedom becomes the possibility of self-creation.
But lately I have begun to suspect there is something beyond even this. A stage beyond the need to create meaning at all.
4. Holy Participation
Now, I’m no scholar. I’m just a curious writer who likes to use his own life as an experiment in truth.
But I believe there is another orientation available to us.
Not the discovery of meaning. Not even the creation of meaning. But the transcendence of the demand for meaning itself.
I call it:
Holy Participation.
Wittgenstein came close to something like this when he wrote that the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.
Perhaps the question “What is the meaning of life?” contains a category error from the beginning. It asks life to possess an abstract property that life never promised to possess.
It is a little like asking: What colour is mathematics? What is the weight of justice? What is the dance of dancing?
Perhaps screaming “WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?” at existence and becoming devastated when existence refuses to reply is a strange game we invented for ourselves.
The ocean does not justify itself. Music does not explain why it deserves to exist before allowing itself to be played.
Life happens.
And perhaps our task is not to stand outside of it and finally solve it. Perhaps our task is to participate.
To participate with what I would call an informed naïveté.
We know the game is constructed. And we play anyway.
We know our identities are fluid. And we inhabit them anyway.
We know love offers no guarantees. And we love anyway.
We know everything we create will eventually disappear. And we create anyway.
Not because we have forgotten what postmodernism taught us. But because we have fully metabolized it.
We no longer require purity before participation. We no longer demand eternal justification before allowing ourselves to care. We no longer need to convince ourselves that our mission was written into the stars in order to devote ourselves to it.
We participate in good faith. Without needing the final answer. Without pretending to possess one.
We love despite love’s fragility. We play though the game is constructed. We create art despite our mortality. We build businesses because there is something beautiful about bringing an idea into reality.
We travel. We make friends. We create communities. We make mistakes. We begin again.
We express ourselves in order to simultaneously discover and create who we are.
And we do all of this for the sheer joy of participation itself.
That is why I call it holy.
Not because it is religious. Not because life must secretly contain some supernatural meaning. But because there is something sacred in giving yourself fully to an experience that you know is temporary.
To stand inside the impermanence of life and say:
Yes. I am here. I will participate.
I do not need eternity in order for this moment to matter. I do not need cosmic permission to care. I do not need existence to justify itself before I allow myself to love being alive.
Perhaps meaning is not something that exists before life, waiting to be discovered. Perhaps it is not even something we need to manufacture intellectually.
Perhaps meaning is an emergent property of participation.
The friendship becomes meaningful through the years spent inside it. The work becomes meaningful through devotion to the craft. The city becomes meaningful through the memories accumulated in its streets. The business becomes meaningful through the person you become while building it. The life becomes meaningful through having been lived.
Meaning follows participation. Participation does not need to follow meaning.
And this distinction has changed something very deep in me.
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Now, friend, this is what I love about building a coaching, education, healing, growth—whatever you want to call it—based business.
At its best, it is not merely a mechanism for making money. It is a vehicle for participating in life.
You engage with your ideas. You engage with other human beings. You confront your fears. You develop your craft. You discover what you believe. You articulate it. You teach it. You test it against reality. You fail. You adjust. You create. You express.
You become more fully yourself through the process of building something that could only have come through you.
And if the business succeeds, it creates something else: abundance.
More resources. More freedom. More experiences. More capacity to create. More space to deepen the experiment.
Money, then, is not necessarily the destination. It can simply be fuel for greater participation.
When I look back over my own life, this becomes strangely obvious.
After making $10,000 a month at sixteen from the back of my high-school classroom, I wanted greater participation. After my first $100,000 month, I wanted greater participation. When I became a millionaire, I wanted greater participation.
More creation. More adventure. More expression. More depth. More interesting people. More ambitious games. More of life.
The numbers were never really the thing. They were permission slips into larger arenas of participation.
And I suspect the danger begins when we mistake the scoreboard for the game.
When money becomes proof that we deserve to exist. When mission becomes a justification for our life. When impact becomes another attempt to make ourselves cosmically significant. When growth becomes something we endlessly pursue because stopping would force us to confront the possibility that there was never anywhere we needed to arrive.
Holy participation offers another possibility.
Build because building is beautiful. Grow because growth is interesting. Create because there is something inside you asking to be expressed. Love because loving is one of the great experiences available to a human being. Travel because the world is astonishing. Make money because it expands the range of games you are capable of playing. Share what you have learned because wisdom wants to circulate.
And when one game has run its course, play another.
You do not need to make any of it eternal. You do not need to make any of it pure. You do not need to turn your life into an argument for why your life deserved to happen.
You simply participate. Fully. Lucidly. Courageously. Playfully. With open eyes.
Knowing that the game is temporary. Knowing that the rules are invented. Knowing that you will never possess all the answers. And choosing to throw yourself into it anyway.
Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps it has always been enough.
Real Growth, the writing of your book, the scaling of your business, the forging and expressing of yourself through your work—these are simply vehicles. Beautiful vehicles. Ways of stepping more completely into the arena of your own existence. Ways of participating.
And participation, perhaps, is the thing itself. Not the preparation for life. Not the mechanism through which you finally earn life. Life itself.
The sharing of wisdom is always profitable.
Jay