131–140 of 228 posts
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A bit of a tangent, but it's fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community. I would like to see a collection of such anecdotes, but I can see why it doesn't get compiled, because it would essentially just be [description of community] and then [Facebook], with no specifically interesting thing to report other t…
> fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community There's an analogy here to suffocating in an anoxic atmosphere. Our bodies don't sense blood oxygen well. Instead, our urge to breathe is mainly driven by dissolved CO2 [1]. So if you're breathing out CO2, and breathing in no O2, your alarm bells stay mostly silen…
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I think this is why all the community events and social things in my neighborhood are organized by a few wealthy retirees. The rest of us are too busy spending all our time breaking our backs trying to survive another week so that maybe when we are 80 we’ll be able to get involved with something.
A quick look at your comments history suggests you are in the US. Of course individual circumstances can vary but overall looking at median disposable income adjusted for purchasing power parity (median equivalised household disposable income), the US is the wealthiest non-tiny country in the world (tecnically this data only covers the OECD and Luxembourg, a country smaller than many US cities, is the wealthiest). ht…
It’s hard to not feel financially insecure from mid-teens through mid 30s-40s in age. And after then, there is just a sense that things will work out if one doesn’t screw up employment, house purchase, or face unexpected health issues. The less prudent can easily trip and fall, metaphorically speaking. Plus childcare expenses and retirement savings easily soak up any remaining disposable income…
And while historically inflation has been modest, the last 5-10 years show otherwise…
Never take community events for granted. There's always people behind the scenes putting in the effort to make it happen, it didn't just come out of nowhere.
Reminds me of 2013 when I organized a TEDx, gosh so much work for absolute zero return. Also risk, what was I thinking?
Is the value of a task measured solely by a return?
The return doesn't have to be money or fame. The journey itself can have some value, be that knowledge, wisdom, connections, whatever else. But all that is its return.
America used to be awash with grassroots social institutions. I know an elderly gent who belonged to the Lions _and_ two similar organizations. When my mother was young, there were dances and dinners multiple nights a week. Which, for me, raises the question why weren't these things passed down? Why weren't the young a kind of apprentices to the old? That seems like the natural progression. But we see this generation…
From there, the track downhill is death by a thousand cuts: radio, melting pot, television, suburbs, Internet, etc.
So in a sense one might mourn the loss, but I think it seems worth pointing out that they were enabled in the first place by a particular set of conditions that weren't some baked-in human default.
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> it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon. I think greed and corruption (cheating) by politicians and government employees has an outsized effect on this. Whenever you hear about it you lose trust and may even feel justified to cheat the system in turn. Basically they got there's, so I'll get mine. IMO the penalties for co…
> IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. Tough to do when those who write the laws are a part of the problem. What do you suggest to make this so?
Passion can be just as contagious as defeatism.
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That's an interesting take - although there was literally a global pandemic just a few years ago. Granted, the nature of surviving that pandemic involved reinforcing several isolating habits on a societal scale. I'm curious as to what situations would actually result in more fabric produced on a large scale.
Oh, the pandemic - that's a great counterpoint you bring up. And I like the distinction you make that the collective experience was quite strange: collective in the aggregate, but profoundly isolating in (individual) practice. I wonder if the deeply isolated experience of covid actually feeds into and supports the original premise, in its own inverse way.
I'd be super interested to see some good roadmaps to restore the social fabric that @barry-cotter is chatting about.
There was a neat blog post I read from here a while ago about this couple that began fostering community by introducing a consistent low-friction activity in their neighborhood (in this case morning coffee outside). It was a wholesome read: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simpl....