where can i purchase 1 community please (part two)
dodging and weaving between community as a social idea and community as a political idea only to reveal... they are one
I sent the last newsletter at 1:33am because I was going to schedule send it and then kept becoming too nervous that excavating my neuroses around the idea of community only made me sound tightly wound and wasn’t relatable. To my relief and disappointment, I learned that my neuroses here were relatable to people! Anyways, keeping up with the total lack of posting cadence, here I am.
Also, to put myself ahead of the shocking controversy—the WikiHow features thirteen steps, but I’m stopping before the “Keeping Community Strong” portion because I cannot strengthen what I haven’t created.
Thank you for hanging out with me and my themelessness!
FIVE: Have standards for membership. While standards sound exclusive, they're actually a way to foster a sense of belonging. You want to gather people with similar goals, opinions, and perspectives. Think about the kind of members your community needs and how to establish rough standards.
Community and belonging are vital for our personal wellbeing and also the basis upon which we can meaningfully make progress on addressing basically every issue that plagues our society. I wish knowing that gave me more urgency and made it feel more possible than it does.
We pretend that the personal and the political exist as two separate entities, like the brain and the mind. Philosophers of mind and cognition don’t come for me, but I think both these dichotomies are false comforts and what we often claim are two different things are two different levels of analysis of the same subject. They certainly feel different, but that does not mean they are wholly distinct.
Community is the basis upon which we build a better world, in terms of organizing and utilizing “people power” and demanding better and whatnot. I understand that community is the entry point for addressing every other dire issue we face and that together we’re stronger and we need an ethics of care and mutual aid is important and solidarity not charity and do the work and—
We focus a lot on the shared experience, shared interest, and shared goal aspects of community, which are obviously important. However, I think that we elide the struggle of knowing people and forming community with people who have the same politics as you but are interpersonally incompatible, and also the flip side of people who you interpersonally like and have fun with but hold political perspectives you find infuriating (I don’t mean this in a “be friends with Republicans” way at all, I mean this on a liberal/left divide or apathetic/caring a lot divide).
Regarding the first situation, one part of Ezra Klein’s conversation with Michelle Goldberg on the state of feminism that has been haunting me (emphasis mine):
And there’s contempt for aging in our society, but there’s a very special contempt for aging women. And so kind of middle-age and aging women were kind of always the marker of something that’s uncool, at least if they get to a certain — it’s possible, I guess, to kind of transcend that and get to icon status. But in general, if you’re kind of always trying to distance yourself from the middle age, you’re both distancing yourself often from the people who are the sort of people who make a lot of local politics run, because who keeps your local Democratic committee alive in many places. Who are the people after 2016 who poured into Democratic organizing?
In many cases, it was cringe wine moms. And in many cases, those women are still there. So that’s part of it. And then I think the other part of it is maybe just about like geographic concentration or geographic polarization, where it’s really easy to live in a place where the kind of questions that you’re talking about, how you raise kids on $75,000 a year, are just — you just don’t encounter those people. And certainly, you don’t encounter them maybe until you have kids yourself.
I thought of this when I joined an event about politically organizing for abortion rights and the Zoom room was me and fifteen middle-aged white women and one white woman a little bit older than me. I don’t connect well with these people! We have a shared goal but that’s about it and I’m afraid when we get into the details the goal won’t even be shared! I grew up in the Midwest and am not upset by microaggressions but I also do not wish to voluntarily put myself in a situation where anyone asks me if I drink soy sauce or compliments me for having more personality than most Asians (these are both real comments I have received, the latter more than once). What now?
Where there is community, there will be conflict and discomfort and I’ve used this as an excuse and a shield to avoid the reality that not all the work of politically organizing for our rights and for a better world will be exactly the work that I want to be doing with exactly the people I want to be working with.
Now the other incongruency I mentioned, the interpersonally compatible but politically less so… this one I’m less sure about. I say “interpersonally compatible” to encapsulate a wide range, from friends to people I know who I think are nice and have good intentions. I’m not suggesting I only want to interact with people with my exact same takes and perspective on the world at all. More than anything, my struggle with this issue is the feeling of being gaslit—looking around at the state of the world and feeling like it is completely crumbling, and being met with nihilistic indifference (“What’s the point of thinking about it all the time when we can’t do anything?”) or neoliberal optimism (“[insert bad thing such as Long COVID, climate disaster, mass shooting, losing access to abortion and/or contraception, etc.] probably won’t happen to you” or “This is why we need to vote”).
I also find myself upset with people for not being as seething with rage or spiraling out with despair as I sometimes am; This is an impulse that I know is not good, because being upset looks different for different people, and the level of emotiveness doesn’t correlate to “how much you care” nor does it particularly benefit anyone more. We also were not built to know this much information all the time. Sometimes I worry people take logging off too far and insulate themselves from the realities of other people in this world, but then I also remember that me reading every tweet about the myriad of bad things happening doesn’t do much for anyone either.
SIX: Gather like-minded people. Look for people with the same views and opinions. You can create a loose community by identifying people with similar wants, needs, and feelings and introducing them. Be on the lookout for people who could fit in to your community and try to bring them into it
The verbs here, “Gather” and “Look” and “Be on the lookout” and “bring them” feel complicated to me. We’re gonna gather and… do what? “Bring them” where? Into what? This is just me wanting to be told what to do explicitly and knowing that won’t be happening.
I’m still thinking about Tressie McMillan Cottom’s essay on “consumer citizenship” and how we have not been provided other avenues to demonstrate our care. In classic “to a hammer everything looks like a nail” fashion, all we know how to do is donate and post. Giving people money isn’t always the answer. It certainly helps in a lot of cases. We’ve transactionalized and gig economy-ified and depersonalized services in a way that makes it feel like giving people money could be the end-all answer. Sometimes someone bringing you soup is worth more than the soup could possibly be worth! The ride to the airport from a friend is worth an unspecifiable amount that is definitely greater than the Uber cost saved.
And posting is sometimes helpful and online communities are important, but social media is in many ways a weak simulacrum for real connection and community that sucks up our time and energy.
This week in the paper of record, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote about how her thinking on protests has changed:
In the past, a truly big march was the culmination of long-term organizing, an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence, indicating prior planning and strength. Large numbers of people had gotten together and worked for a long time, coordinating, preparing — and getting to know one another and making decisions. So they didn’t just manage to hold a protest; lacking easier ways to organize, they ended up having to build organizational capacity, which then helped navigate what came after.
But since the early 2000s, a big protest has started to feel more like a sentence that begins with a question mark. Newspapers still remark on their size — and many of them are very large — but I’m less impressed now by mere size: The global Occupy demonstrations, the Arab Spring protests and the Women’s March in 2017 all could lay claim to being larger than any previous protest. Maybe they would go on to build more sustained power, but maybe not.
I think this applies to community as well in a way. Finding people might have become less challenging in some ways, but organizing them and building momentum to genuinely form a community feels harder. It reminds me of how Facebook diluted the word “friend.” What may look like or be referred to as “community” now often isn’t quite the same as what we used to mean.
SEVEN: Organize events. Community members bond through shared experiences. Bring people together to celebrate, socialize, and interact. This can help foster a sense of community and help you find more members.
I would like a secular church vibe—weekly gathering in a space that does not require purchase and is ideally beautiful, you all dress up and consume content (I’m sorry I just called a sermon content), then discuss slash gossip over lunch. Enough people that the show goes on even when some people miss it. Other activities and subgroups that spring from it.
The grey clouds roll into my brain immediately. Even assuming everyone lives in the same place… Everyone is being pulled in a million different directions, is exhausted after work, has other relationships and communities to participate in, is a flake, hates small talk, is skeptical, is averse to awkward situations, doesn’t want to take any sort of risk, is only going to talk to the people in the room they already know…
I thought about putting some kind of a, “if you want to join me in attempting to override all these neuroses and work on experiencing true community, message me!” offer in here and I immediately thought about how nobody wants to seem desperate or be the one to DM or put themselves out there and how I wouldn’t respond to this if it was in someone else’s newsletter. Take this as the call and be better than me, I guess.
Also, Karishma and I are trying to form a virtual book club, with the first book being What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo so let me know if that’s a thing you would join! I figure if you read this far in, you’re a solid candidate.
EIGHT: Push for meaningful conversations. Strong social connections between members is important to any community. When going out with others, encourage meaningful connections. Try to forego small talk and have people open up to one another.
The cynic in me is convinced anyone who says upfront that they looove deep conversations is (1.) bad at having deep conversations and (2.) doing it for clout. Though I have professed my disdain for small talk more than once, I have to say I do believe it serves a necessary function. You can’t just open with your deepest traumas and secrets without making it a little hard to proceed, especially if the other person is not equally prepared to start sharing. I find people who claim to be “open books” slightly suspicious because their sharing feels less like it is a matter of trust and relationship-building if they’ve told me they’d do this with anyone.
A meaningful connection in conversation requires not just hearing, but listening, which is honestly pretty hard to do all the time. I am perhaps overly sensitive to feeling not listened to, and find myself almost actively looking for evidence of the following: someone continuing their train of thought with absolutely no acknowledgement or engagement with what the other person said, a weak signal of agreement that feels like the person agreeing just wants the other person to stop talking, a contrarian take for the sake of argument rather than the content or value of the discussion. It’s easy to start formulating your response and lose track of listening to what you’re intending to respond to. Online discourse incentivizes us to prioritize having our take prepared instead of absorbing and processing a wide array of thoughts. We’re used to posting with a bizarre mix of totalizing regard and mindless disregard for who sees it, for one-sided content consumption and protracted thoughts.
Meaningful connection and genuine community requires a time and energy investment I am sometimes unable and sometimes unwilling to commit. I’m trying to focus on the word sometimes there, which I tend to see as glass half-empty but also means glass half-full. The people I have known in my life, whether we still speak or not, have fundamentally shaped who I am in ways I can’t even enumerate properly.
Several months ago I went on a rampage trying to point out to everyone I know that at any given moment, you have hurt and been hurt by the fewest people in your life that you ever will be. The more I sit with this, I am less destroyed by it, surprisingly. I remind myself that every time I have been hurt, there have been people ready to sit with me and lament and scream and tease and review dozens of screenshots and move forward. Individualism could never. The upfront investment in your friends and your community returns a thousandfold in ways you can’t yet predict, in times of pain you can’t prevent. I feel like WikiHow should probably mention that part. It’s not fun to try to emerge from the psychological defensive crouch you’ve taken for much of your life, but what else is there to do these days?
Some Content I Consumed Recently:
Note: Shoutout to Kara for suggesting I try this format. I find these types of roundups both thrilling and overwhelming in other newsletters; I highly recommend the app/Chrome extension Pocket so you can save all the articles you mean to read and then go back for them later. Also, you (read as: I) have to find peace with the fact that you won’t get to consume all the content. :(
If you can come up with a more exciting heading for this section or suggest another section I can do, I will love you forever.
How to live in a haunted house.
When doctors have to choose between providing care for their patients and facing risk of imprisonment, only bad things happen. Clinics in states where abortion is still legal are overwhelmed.
My friend Vineel sent me this song.
I can’t stop thinking about how even the most so-called progressive institutions are constantly undermining and punishing women for calling out sexism and racism. This is about Felicia Sonmez and Erin Overbey and also with the knowledge that this kind of shit is more publicly visible in media but probably not that different from other fields.
You start out as Generic Asian Man or Pretty Asian Woman.
The “trans debate” is no debate at all, and we need the liberal media to stop treating it like one. 1,000 Spongebobs to cope.
I’m ready for Maggie Rogers to show me how to surrender. Keke Palmer has been around for so long and she only gets cooler. But is anyone famous anymore?
How much content about making friends must I consume before I become good at making friends? What about for dating?