Inspire the Mind
Begin Now
Welcome to the free edition of YouTopian Journey, a Substack featured publication. Each week I will be sharing unique wisdom that can help you in the daily battles that we must all fight in the game of life.
This week it is my pleasure to share the post I wrote for Inspire the Mind, a mental health blog attached to King’s College London.
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Just a note that we are off this weekend due to the Labor Day holiday in the U.S.
Now onto the good stuff.
The Inner Journey for an Outer World
It came from the east. A virus that changed the world. The mental health, especially of Gen Z and Millennials, was precarious at best. With lockdowns and a society transformed, a mental health and wellness shift was needed. We needed something more than apps, sayings, and hashtags. We needed something that resonated. Something that spoke to the individual among us, not just the face in the crowd.
We needed the YouTopian Journey.
The YouTopian Journey is more than just a newsletter and more than a graphic novel. It is an inner journey for an outer world. A mindset guide for a mindset shift that not only entertains, but benefits the reader.
It launched in February of 2021 on Substack with almost one-hundred issues produced to date. The art continues to be created in preparation for launching the first issue comic of the graphic novel.
My name is Shaun Gold. As a polymathic super-connector (which is a fancy term for someone who has a lot of interests and who takes action), I was inspired to use my time in the lockdown to create something that could be beneficial to society. I wanted to do something different, something that clicked with readers, something that was uniquely my own. More importantly, I wanted to create something that could be useful…truly useful to inspiring and motivating readers to become mentally stronger. This is why YouTopian Journey was created, because before there was nothing like it.
Before I started YouTopian Journey, I had a variety of roles. I worked with startups in every non-technical capacity one could imagine, wrote multiple books, appeared on the game show Jeopardy, was involved in promoting and marketing some of the highest grossing nightclubs in the world (which in turn provided me a street education in psychology and philosophy) and wrote multiple screenplays. As a result of my unique background I am an invited guest lecturer at universities across the United States (everywhere from Georgetown to University of Miami, my alma mater) on a variety of topics ranging from entrepreneurship to consumer behavior.
As an avid reader, my knowledge from YouTopian Journey stems from some of my favorite books. This includes Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Courage to Create by Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself by Rollo May, Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, Dokkōdō by Miyamoto Musashi, and more.
This led me to realize that knowledge in our society was lacking. Not just general knowledge that formed the backbone of our society, but knowledge of philosophy, psychology, and history. This is the knowledge that determines how we live, and more importantly, how we die.
Additionally, we are losing our key values that as a species, are required.
Fortitude, inner strength, personal meaning and purpose, mental wellness and endurance, kindness, and confidence. It is hard to have a strong mind when everyone around you appears to have lost theirs. It is even harder to build up your soul while everyone else is selling theirs to the highest bidder. A shift has happened and has taken our population to the abyss, where just a little push could be fatal. I wanted to solve this problem.
You can read the rest here.
I want to wish you a great holiday weekend. If YouTopian Journey truly helps you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. YouTopian Journey is a reader supported publication and your subscription helps support the art work and the content.
Thank you.
Shaun