Re: “meatspace and the importance of horizontal communities”
Noah’s piece about the benefits of very communities was really good. But even accounting for his concern that vertical communities will never fully be able to replace horizontal communities, he misses an important point.
He links to Bill Bishop’s 2009 book “The Big Sort”. The so…
Re: “meatspace and the importance of horizontal communities”
Noah’s piece about the benefits of very communities was really good. But even accounting for his concern that vertical communities will never fully be able to replace horizontal communities, he misses an important point.
He links to Bill Bishop’s 2009 book “The Big Sort”. The social worker, researcher and author Brené Brown also quotes Bishop to explain how Americans have “geographically, politically and even spiritually sorted ourselves into like-minded groups in which we silence dissent, grow more extreme in our thinking, and consume only facts that support our thinking - making it easier to ignore evidence that our positions are wrong.” This, she says, reminds her of Veronica Rothy’s dystopian novel “Divergent”, in which people choose factions based on their personalities. The axiom was “Faction before blood”. More than family, our factions are where we belong.”
Rather than Noah’s positive spin, she finds this idea horrifying. “Walking away from people we know and love because of our support for strangers we really don’t know, can barely believe, and definitely don’t love, who for sure won’t be there to drive us to chemo or bring over food when the kids are sick - that’s the shadow side of sorting”.
But perhaps most damning is that counterintuitively, all the sorting by politics and beliefs we’ve been doing hasn’t led to more social interaction or a deeper sense of connection with our like-minded friends. According to Bishop, *at the same time sorting is on the rise, so is loneliness*. In 1980, about 20% of people reported feeling lonely. Today, it’s closer to 50%.
So yeah, the data totally supports JVL’s concern here. I don’t know if we’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole that we can still fix things by “hugging it out”. But I pray we haven’t and we should do everything we can to try to connect to our actual families and communities while we still can. Loneliness isn’t just problematic- loneliness kills.
Re: “meatspace and the importance of horizontal communities”
Noah’s piece about the benefits of very communities was really good. But even accounting for his concern that vertical communities will never fully be able to replace horizontal communities, he misses an important point.
He links to Bill Bishop’s 2009 book “The Big Sort”. The social worker, researcher and author Brené Brown also quotes Bishop to explain how Americans have “geographically, politically and even spiritually sorted ourselves into like-minded groups in which we silence dissent, grow more extreme in our thinking, and consume only facts that support our thinking - making it easier to ignore evidence that our positions are wrong.” This, she says, reminds her of Veronica Rothy’s dystopian novel “Divergent”, in which people choose factions based on their personalities. The axiom was “Faction before blood”. More than family, our factions are where we belong.”
Rather than Noah’s positive spin, she finds this idea horrifying. “Walking away from people we know and love because of our support for strangers we really don’t know, can barely believe, and definitely don’t love, who for sure won’t be there to drive us to chemo or bring over food when the kids are sick - that’s the shadow side of sorting”.
But perhaps most damning is that counterintuitively, all the sorting by politics and beliefs we’ve been doing hasn’t led to more social interaction or a deeper sense of connection with our like-minded friends. According to Bishop, *at the same time sorting is on the rise, so is loneliness*. In 1980, about 20% of people reported feeling lonely. Today, it’s closer to 50%.
So yeah, the data totally supports JVL’s concern here. I don’t know if we’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole that we can still fix things by “hugging it out”. But I pray we haven’t and we should do everything we can to try to connect to our actual families and communities while we still can. Loneliness isn’t just problematic- loneliness kills.