Sometimes, I’m not sure what I’m going to write before I start writing it. I look at the categories that a piece might be published with (Drawing, Poetry, Writing) and cannot decide. This could have been a poem, though not a drawing this morning. But here it is. Prose. And I’ve been thinking about building connections that are not quite so alienating as many interactions are structured to be in our technologically lovely modern society. I’d like to be a member of a group that needs every member and I’d like to share everything I have with that group. And call me too social, but I’d rather have the unit be larger than a family. And less constrained by location. In the weeks since my departure from employment (and as someone who does not neatly fit into the other categories that economists measure – discouraged worker, unemployed both do not apply) I have discovered a way of connecting that has always felt natural, but has often been smothered by the sense that I needed to be winning, to be advancing, and to be getting things from the people I interacted with. It’s the reason so many people talk about distaste for “networking” – the notion that socializing to be able to climb the ladder a bit faster is something that a well-socialized human would do is something that triggers a gag reflex in lots of humans that listen to their feelings and instincts.
What’s to be done without LinkedIn, without a position in a corporate bureaucratic hierarchy, without a three word answer to the question “what do you do”? Well, to be human and be around other humans seems like a strong start. The Internet has enabled lots of hanging out that doesn’t require even the spending of money on a cup of coffee and the question of who pays. It just requires being in a place with wiffy and looking at a portal that has a person on the other end (or many people). The same is possible in a real life physical place, and the pandemic’s celebration of “let’s go for a walk” rather than “let’s go get a beer” has created an interaction mechanism that requires doing nothing that earns beer money (outside of being able to acquire enough fuel to metabolically fuel a walk).
What outcome could I be looking for as a result of this semi-stochastic, capital-free method for interacting? What goal could I be seeking? Is it the construction of an Esalen Institute that would bring the “like-minded” together to be in community and be able to exit from society together on a regular basis (or continuously if you make your home at the farm-commune-compound)? This feels like it’s unnecessary. Voluntary association doesn’t require the departure from places, jobs, or family. Churches have known this for a long time, as have the associations that used to pepper the American life (volunteer fire brigades, flag raising crews, mutual insurance groups, fraternal orders). What I want is to be a member of lots of associations in which sharing, seeing, and maybe taking action together are a part of it. I’m not convinced that a pirate ship return to total interdependence reflects the lessons of history, anthropology, and, dare I utter it, “economics” (always in scare quotes, I’d rather spend an evening with mean otters swimming in a river than with three economics and a bottle of whiskey).
So it’s interconnection with supportive characteristics. Sure, I’ll have to get back into a category that can either collect unemployment checks or pay checks at some point (though hopefully not as a fairly unfaithful servant in a crushing bureaucracy), but in the meantime and when that happens, I can be a part of humanity in a way that didn’t feel possible when I was younger. Because the systems we have today may not celebrate community, togetherness and friendship, but the capitalists, communists, anarchists, and other pure-ists have accidentally created a ton of technology and processes that enable we friendship-ists to thrive in everyone’s dystopia (comfortable walking shoes, Zoom, Limited Liability Company charter documents).
You’ll find me walking around Madison, WI, on a bike anywhere, and hanging around the open spaces intermediated by the electrons in the tubes. See you around.
Roman Ryan 