Do It For The Plot (Is Good Advice)
Rune Soup
Gordon White
4.7 • 861 Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
There's a meme that's been evolving since 2021, and in its current chaotic incarnation, it's become accidentally magical—even if the people using it don't realise it.
In this episode, I'm unpacking "do it for the plot" as a practical framework for the year ahead. Not just as permission to take risks, but as a way of activating synchronicity and maintaining agency when things inevitably go sideways on the way to your goals.
I'll walk you through how to use this alongside your existing magical toolkit—your amulets, your enchantments, your divination practice—and share the diagnostic story I keep coming back to for checking where I'm actually at versus where I think I am.
I'm also introducing a new project I've been wrestling with: hospicing modernity's magic. Because the late twentieth century gave us some genuinely powerful techniques wrapped in a frame that insists magic isn't real. I want to find a way to respectfully retain the useful stuff and jettison the less-than-useful.
There's practical advice here for interrogating your intentions for 2026, plus some thoughts on why the slacker-era re-enchantment is officially over and what needs to replace it.
Happy new year, kids!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A lot of memes are energetically terrible. |
| 0:19.2 | Okay, so brain rot. |
| 0:21.7 | Brain rot content, for instance. |
| 0:24.0 | I don't love this term. |
| 0:25.1 | I wrote a substack post about it a couple of months ago. |
| 0:28.3 | Inspired by a friend of mine who has rot days, which just, they make my skin crawl |
| 0:34.2 | these terms, right? Because however you conceive of the spirit world, I would say |
| 0:43.8 | parsimoniously, considering the imaginal and the spirit world identical, is a good start. Now, |
| 0:50.9 | you can talk about amplitude or you can, I don't know, make it more complicated if you want to, fine. |
| 0:57.8 | But at the very least, there is some kind of overlap. |
| 1:01.4 | And what that means is the role of metaphor and symbol, quite literally how magic works, |
| 1:09.0 | has some kind of impact on how we play out here. |
| 1:14.0 | So declaring you or yourself to have a rot day, like fallow, rest, restoration, stargate immortality chamber, right? Anything is better than, oh, I'm going to actually rot. |
| 1:33.8 | No, bueno. Do it for the plot is good. It's a good meme, and it's certainly good advice, at least. |
| 1:43.3 | Because as far as I can tell, it works on the fact that the universe runs on magic. |
| 1:50.4 | Because it works on, at least the way I use it, or I'm going to commend it to you. |
| 1:57.5 | It works on activating synchronicity and having the universe respond to your play. |
| 2:05.6 | It's not quite where it started. |
| 2:08.4 | The old school chaos magician in me likes to pay attention to when memes in the original sense |
| 2:14.3 | emerge from the digital news sphere and take fire, |
| 2:18.0 | because it's almost a hint of the promise. |
| 2:21.6 | The internet we could have had, |
... |
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