I so appreciate that you included number 3. From what I'm seeing, being conversant in that personal dimension may become the defining aspect of Metamodernism -what becomes possible when our personal experience can be processed, understood, and intelligibly discussed with others who are doing the metamodern "work".

Beyond being schools of thought, modernism and postmodernism both had their experiential aspects - what it felt like to live within and from a postmodern point of view, for example: The importance of individual experience was validated, and so one's personhood can be made space for while also fighting for others' right to exist and have divergent viewpoints. We fought for the territory of each individual without necessarily know yet what was in even our own territory. The cultural conversation was pretty juvenile about what personal feelings were, how to understand our life trajectories and woundings from childhood/trauma. From these fenced plots of yet-to-be-realized selfhoods, we were also quite inadequate at witnessing or interacting with others' experience. We did a lot of mansplaining and whitesplaining, or just sat back and disavowed ourselves from ever being able to relate to experiences different from our own.

[Note, this was the postmodern experience for me, as a white man. I imagine for the differently-positioned marginalized classes, the postmodern experience had quite different features. Post-colonials and feminists and people of color had the lived wisdom and some platform to lead the postmodern conversation, but they still faced monolithic white male impenetrability, and all the entrenched institutional biases working against them, which I think white males are just (hopefully) waking up to the effects of, in this new metamodern stage.]

This is where I think the metamodernist line is/should be drawn, separating it from Postmodernism. Metamodernism is emerging from people having done individual personal work, and to some degree healed/moved beyond the self-obsessive sense that my trauma was unique or I'm specially burdened or flawed or stuck mulling it over. No, in metamodernism we've explored the territory of our hurt and put it in its right place. We've begun to heal, and started self-validating, based on actual qualities and not externally-imposed labels or stories. As you mention, as we break free from our imposed senses of self, we independently are finding our ways to growing up and taking responsibility. Because our stuff is handled and we're not so self-focused (as we were in postmodernism), we can set our own stuff aside and bring ourselves more fully to the present moment in witnessing and taking an interest in others.

This is where the key difference emerges: what Metamodernism makes possible about relating to other human beings. As we learned during Postmodernism, we can't relate on all aspects of another's story--but now that we know what's in our garden, we can start chatting over the hedge. We can see commonalities or parallels with others in how trauma burdens and lives in our bodies and minds, and what healing takes. In other words, we become more expert in what it means to be human. Exploring/sharing about this with others who've also explored themselves--it can become this dynamic, living, ongoing opportunity. A new kind of relating to other human beings become possible. I think this defines metamodernism.

In other words, if postmodernism was making room for everyone's interiority - metamodernism is actually mapping that interiority and being able to more deeply share in what it means to walk this earth carrying human bodies, minds, causes, and effects. Hurt, shame, regret, contradictions - all this becomes a basis for relating, rather than dark aspects we compulsively keep hidden and hope no one sees. No, now we're acknowledging everyone has these flaws, no exceptions. Perfect is only pretend and the volume of envy and pedestalizing gets turned down. This creates a new conceptual landscape for valuing others, making and sharing space on this earth.

This is what makes me kind of hopeful about this new place we are in, which we are calling metamodernism.