Read more

You can join our Annual Membership ($100/year) to participate in our interactive events, access our Member Database and Slack, receive the Tissue Review each month, and attend our annual retreat. Or, you can join the Tissue Crew ($200/year) to participate in member-led groups, receive microgrants for in-person gatherings, get some snazzy swag, and double your support for Connective Tissue.

The piece that follows includes my reflections on what worked and didn’t during our first year of membership, and more details on how to become a member. I owe a big thank you to our Member Steward (or Shaman), , for her help with this reflection and her facilitation of our membership. Now, to the actual piece. - Sam

Become a Member

Last year, we launched the Connective Tissue membership network to “put our theories of membership into practice.” This year, I’m here to say: Mission accomplished. No notes.

If only.

But I can say that we have at least tried to practice membership. Over the past 12 months, more than 200 people have become Connective Tissue members. I’ve scheduled 70 one-on-one onboarding meetings with new members, and have made well over 100 member-to-member intros following these conversations. We’ve hosted 16 interactive events, like our recent “Beyond Bob Book Club” with member-author Ian Corbin and our “Community Wishlist” member gift exchange. We created a Member Database, a Member Slack network, and a Little Free Library of member-generated resources. And, earlier this month, we organized our first official Connective Tissue retreat — facilitated by and exclusively for our members.

We have also learned a lot through the process of practicing membership. We’ve seen the potential of the newsletter to magnetically attract members who are aligned with the relational and participatory principles that underpin our work (and repel those who aren’t). We’ve experienced the technical limits of attempting to build a membership network through Substack. And we’ve clarified our sense of how in-person offerings will fit into our membership moving forward.

I’ve also come to appreciate that member dues are what enable me to keep Connective Tissue going on a consistent basis. When we kicked off the membership last year, I resisted leaning into this angle because it felt self-centered. But I spend about 10-20 hours per week on the newsletter — and even more on pieces like “What Money Can’t Buy” and “Connection Grift” — and many readers seem to really like what we’re putting out. Your membership dues, and the modest but non-insignificant revenue they produce, are what allows me to put this kind of time into each newsletter. I don’t take it for granted.

Because I swore a sacred blood oath to turn everything I write on Substack into some sort of thought piece, the bulk of what follows is my honest reflection on what worked and didn’t work during our first year of membership — along with an update on the questions we’re asking and how we’re approaching membership in the year to come. But what follows is also an invitation: both to become a dues-paying member, and to help power the writing of Connective Tissue.

What Went Well

If I were to pick a word to describe what went well with our first year of membership, it would be authenticity or alignment. Many members shared that their membership experiences felt consistent with the values underpinning our work — our participatory and relational principles, and our experimental, substantive, and irreverent ethos.

From the early days, members made high-quality connections. Since our membership launch last year, I’ve heard many stories of members connecting with one another in ways that have led to new friendships and collaborations. Sometimes, this happens intentionally — especially following my onboarding meetings with new members, after which I usually make 2-3 targeted intros. Other times, it happens organically — through our interactive events, Member Database, and Slack network. But the structures, here, seem to be less important than the cultural alignment that’s cultivated through a shared connection to the newsletter. Members have consistently described their experience of meeting fellow members as “authentic” to the ethos that come across through Connective Tissue.

Our participatory model for digital events has also (mostly) worked. We’ve consistently opted for a more participation-driven, “show don’t tell” style of event, and these have mostly gone well. Many of our events feature three to four rapid presentations from active practitioners and thinkers, immediately followed by breakout rooms where you can go deeper with the featured guest and others interested in their work. Event themes have spanned a range of topics relevant to our members, from “Neighborhood Membership,” to “Measurement & Deeper Ways of Knowing,” to “Connection Across Life Transitions.” The feedback we’ve received is that our events are engaging, encourage peer-learning and mutual support, facilitate and deepen connection among members, and feel like Connective Tissue-style events.

Our first official Connective Tissue retreat, hosted earlier this month, was a success. Nearly 30 members participated in our inaugural retreat, which was both designed and facilitated by fellow members. On the spectrum from traditional conference to summer camp, the retreat was 90 percent summer camp. We cooked, ate, and cleaned together, participated in member-led sessions together, and hiked, played, laughed, and enjoyed downtime together.

The retreat felt like it had the potential to become an anchor for our member experience. For one, the translation from digital newsletter and membership to in-person gathering was surprisingly smooth. People showed up, and I didn’t take that as a given! But it was also how people showed up. No one was there to network or use the space to advance their own objectives; everyone showed up embracing the spirit of relationship and reciprocity, and committing to their responsibilities to the group (e.g., cooking, cleaning). The retreat gave members the chance to put some of our espoused principles into practice, while cultivating relationships that they could continue to deepen long after the retreat.

What Went Less Well

Please don’t take the above to imply that we achieved some sort of digital-to-in-person-membership-utopia. A lot didn’t go as well as we had hoped, and these shortcomings reflected both the limitations of Substack as a platform, and our limitations (and learning curve) as organizers of a new membership network.

Let’s start where we are: Substack is an imperfect place to build a membership network. The core issue, in a word, is inflexibility. For instance, we explored adding a membership application — both to ensure prospective members understood what they were joining, and to create a better filter for ethos-alignment among our members. However, because Substack has a standard, non-customizable subscription flow, the only way to do this cleanly would be to leave Substack entirely (which we weren’t ready to do). And though Substack has several membership-oriented features — subscriber chats, Substack Lives — they are more designed for para-social relationships with influencers than peer-based relationships among members. As such, we’ve pieced our membership together using many off-platform products: Slack for our digital network, Airtable for our Member Database, and Zoom for our digital events.

But we can’t just blame Substack; our initial vision for a committee structure also fell flat. When we launched membership last year, we envisioned member-led committees as one of the main pillars of the member experience. My thinking was that we could put our theories of membership into practice: aligning membership, revenue, and governance. But within two months of starting the membership, it became clear that our vision for committees was easier said than done.

Part of this involved a lack of clarity about what committees would do, especially in the early stages of figuring out membership. Our hypothesis was that the committees would help shape the actual member experience. However, the reality was that the member experience needed much more substance before members could see their way into shaping it. The other part of this had to do with my lack of commitment to committees. As soon as I realized it would take significant effort to figure out how to make our committee structure work, I doubled-down on what seemed to be already working — and, in so doing, I de-prioritized committees within the membership.

And though our events “worked well,” organizing them took a lot more time than we expected. Almost all of our events turned out to be big lifts to organize. Our typical event took about 15-20 hours to put together — from coming up with a solid premise, to inviting and preparing the right featured guests, to developing a strong run of show, to promoting and coordinating registration, to following up after the event.

This wouldn’t be a problem if we were running the membership with a full-time program staff. But we’re intentionally attempting to design our membership as a member-led experience that’s not dependent on the typical nonprofit staffing structure. So, moving forward, we’re focusing on running a smaller number of high-quality virtual events, and we’re doubling-down on supporting members to organize and lead their own events and groups (more on this below).

What We’re Asking (and Shifting)

As we enter year two of membership, we’re shifting from the throwing spaghetti phase to the seeing what’s stuck phase. We’re circling around questions like: What’s the core of our membership, and, relatedly, what’s enough? Also, what’s our role as stewards in organizing and facilitating the member experience, compared to the role of members in doing so? As it turns out, these overarching questions cut across the two big questions we’re asking this year.

First, how can we design our membership for different member participation preferences? Three tiers of member participation motivations have emerged over the past year: (1) members who mostly join to support the newsletter, (2) members who partially join to support the newsletter and partially for a modest member experience, and (3) members who join to go deep with fellow members. This has led us to a thread of questions: Do we want to design experiences for each of these groups? If so, what could these experiences look like?

Our answer is yes — and we’re modestly restructuring our membership levels to better align with member preferences. Through our new membership tier, the Tissue Crew, our most engaged members can now opt to go deeper with fellow members through peer-led groups organized around shared interests, opportunities, and needs. Meanwhile, our existing annual membership will continue to offer all of the benefits from our first year — the Tissue Review, the Member Slack and Database, an invitation to the member retreat — just with quarterly events instead of monthly ones. Our hope is that this delineation creates more alignment between our membership tiers and our members’ desired participation levels.

Second, what are the possibilities and limits of our in-person offerings? A membership tied to a Substack newsletter — with members all over the country and world — is, by necessity, going to begin as a digital-first network. But many members join because they care about in-person community and relationships, and with work days that are often mediated by screens, most of us (myself included) don’t want to spend much more time in front of a computer. As we enter our second year of membership, we want to home in on our core in-person offerings.

This is going to involve building on what’s worked, and continuing to test out new things. We’re going to host the retreat for members again, potentially expanding the size from 30 to 50 or hosting two retreats in different parts of the country. We’re also going to be offering microgrants for Tissue Crew members to organize local gatherings for fellow members, and to identify how they’d like to self-organize in the future. We believe in-person experiences can become the relational anchor of our membership. The retreat and microgrants are our attempts to cultivate these anchor experiences, while also beginning to articulate what’s enough.

Become a Member

This is the part of the newsletter where, having fulfilled my blood oath and teed up all that we’ve learned about membership, I invite you to become a Connective Tissue member.

Our membership is built on reciprocity. Joining is a commitment to support the newsletter: Member dues are the newsletter’s sole funding source, and they’re what allow us to publish our Originals and Q&As each month. But joining is also a commitment to support your fellow members — the 200-plus community-builders, policymakers, small business owners, neighbors, funders, thinkers, and readers committed to our generational project of civic renewal.

We have two ways you can exercise your membership muscles: our annual membership ($100/year) and the Tissue Crew ($200/year).1 Both have been designed by members to have many entry points and many opportunities to deepen engagement — digitally and in-the-real-world.

If you’re looking to dip your toes into the membership waters while supporting Connective Tissue, consider signing up for our annual membership. You’ll receive the Tissue Review, which features a monthly deep dive into our favorite reads from the past month, plus spotlights on what your fellow members are up to. You’ll be able to opt into our Member Database and Slack network to learn about fellow members’ work, share asks and offerings, and connect around shared interests. You’ll be invited to participate in our quarterly interactive events, including practice-driven workshops, article discussions, reading groups, and more. And, you’ll have the chance to attend our annual Connective Tissue retreat.

If you’re ready to go deeper with fellow members and/or support Connective Tissue at a higher level, consider joining the Tissue Crew. You’ll be invited to create and participate in member-led groups, and you’ll have the opportunity to apply for microgrants to host member gatherings in your community or region. Plus, you’ll receive priority registration for our annual retreat, and you’ll get your choice of free Connective Tissue merch each year you’re a Tissue Crew member. Call us biased, but we think the merch is pretty cool this year.

Still, we recognize this membership isn’t for everyone. Perhaps you really like the newsletter, but you can’t justify spending money on membership dues right now. No worries whatsoever — we still appreciate your support as a subscriber. Or, perhaps you’re looking for something that has more of a professionalized, polished network-y vibe. If that’s the case, let us know, and we’d be glad to direct you to some other options.

But if membership is feeling right for you, we invite you to join.

Becoming a Connective Tissue member is a commitment to relationship, not a one-off transaction. As a member, you’ll have the opportunity to give and receive support, teach and learn, and help power the writing of Connective Tissue. Make this commitment official, and help make our generational project a shared project. Consider becoming a member today.

Join Today

Over the past year and a half, Darryl and I have jammed in countless group texts on the practices and principles and organizing models and metaphors that are needed for this next iteration of civic life. It was getting to the point where it felt like our conversations should leap from WhatsApp to Substack, so … here we are.

While we couldn’t capture 18 months of texts in a single Q&A, our conversation did not disappoint. We explored how Darryl’s work is trying to re-blur the lines between journalism and civic life. We got into the possibilities of the “do-ocracy” that is News Futures, and the actual structures and processes that underpin the work. We also had the chance to riff on what it takes to build a “compostable organization” that can release its assets back into the shared commons.

Darryl’s a humble, low-key dude, but beneath that humility is a wellspring of wisdom, and this Q&A is just a taster. So, if Darryl’s work and words pique your interest, check out his current projects with News Futures and Commoner, and follow along with him on his personal site and social medias. But, for now, consider giving the full interview a read below — I don’t think you’ll regret it.

- Sam

Share

You’ve done a lot by the ripe old age of 40 — from co-founding and leading City Bureau, to launching the Documenters Network, to, most recently, serving as the Lead Steward of News Futures and half of Commoner’s founding team. How would you begin to describe the throughlines (or connective tissue, if you will) across this work?

I’ve long felt the need to create correctives to what I see in the traditional journalism space. City Bureau and Documenters, Invisible Institute, Illustrated Press, News Futures, Commoner — they all are different frameworks and ways of working that emerged from this desire to create correctives. What are the changes to this system that would preserve what’s good and useful about it? And what did not work about it?

That’s the basis of my work: To create correctives to what’s not working, and to establish the models and frameworks and networks necessary to actualize these correctives.

One corrective I keep returning to, for instance, is how journalism skills really are civic skills. Journalism institutions and newsrooms, as they’ve gotten more professional, have tended to hoard those skills — pulling them increasingly away from local hands and into private coffers.

Let’s hold for a minute on this thread of professionalization within journalism, and how some of your correctives — City Bureau, Documenters, and News Futures — are attempts to re-embed journalism into local communities. Can you speak to how you’re trying to re-blur the lines between journalism and civic life?

We’ve institutionalized something that wasn’t built to be institutionalized. The major newspapers were owned by rich people in the past — much as they are now — but it was a bit more tied to the ground. Today, we have all these systems and structures that continually remove local information systems from the local.

Part of this emerged because we created barriers to who could become a journalist. You used to not need a college degree to be a beat reporter. You would come in as a crime reporter — like I did at the start of my career — and you’d work your way up to being an editor, and eventually you were the one setting the agenda for the day. Now, we have these degreed programs — journalism schools that give out bachelor’s and master’s degrees — to help you prove you have the “qualifications” to be a journalist. These degree programs are functionally paywalls. You have to go to journalism school to learn how to do things that anyone needs to know in order to be tapped into what’s going on around them and to have a sense of agency and influence over their lives.

But there are also actual paywalls. News reporters will spend a year on a story, give you none of the underlying material, and then make you pay for it. That’s mostly public information. Just as with journalism schools, you’re putting things that are part of the commons — part of what we need to be a functioning society — behind these commercialized mechanisms that build the overall wealth of people like Jeff Bezos.

When people want to directly participate in their local information systems, they have few places to go, and it wasn’t always that way. There have been little incremental steps over the course of decades that have led to this entrenched, ossified, and removed system.

What we’re trying to do is re-blur the lines between journalism and civic life, and in so doing, between insiders and outsiders. Documenters follows that logic, as does City Bureau. News Futures is collectivizing the people who agree with those values, and asking: What can we do together? What does it look like to build a bigger constituency that is trying to reimagine civic information for a world where people are tired, and where people don’t feel their agency or their power?

That’s why I say journalism skills are civic skills. They are skills people need when they feel that urge to be a part of things, and they need the information to know how to do something about it.

So how did News Futures emerge in the first place, and what was it responding to?

News Futures used to be called the Future of Local News (FLN), and it began as a gathering. Sarah Alvarez, who is a great writer, editor, and journalist — and longtime friend and collaborator in this work — initially brought us together. We had both seen what was happening: This new crop of indie journalists and nonprofit newsroom leaders were developing and coalescing around different ideas. They were returning to community-first, local-first, participatory principles. So Sarah was just like, “Let’s pull together a small group of people to come to Detroit and figure out what this thing is.”

We started articulating a framework, the Hierarchy of Information Needs, for what we felt was distinct about what we were doing and what wasn’t represented in the zeitgeist at the time. Early on, we focused on how to sustain the models we built: City Bureau, Outlier Media, Resolve Philly. But, over time, it became more about: What do these individuals need who are increasingly seeing themselves as civic media makers? So we started imagining how we could create new systems, find new paths of funding, and build a new field.

How did you go from this initial insight and core group, to the 800-plus member network News Futures is today?

This involved growing, with intention. After that first gathering, we created a plus-one system, where we allowed the people who were in it to invite one new person. Then the question was: Is this exclusive? I don’t think exclusion is necessarily a problem, especially if we’re pushing against a dominant structure. We should want a period of exclusion where we ask: What is it that we’re doing that’s different? How are we saying who we are? Does this person actually fit? But, eventually, we knew it was a thing. We were seeing our language everywhere and constantly showing up to these conferences where our organizations were being showcased. It wasn’t a theoretical practice anymore; it had the makings of an actual movement.

What did that movement require? We needed more people, for one. We also needed to begin figuring out how to structure the engine of the work. How do we move people into the system? What do we actually produce? How do people work together? We use the word do-ocracy. It’s the idea that, if you see a thing that needs to be done, you can step up and do it and rally people internally to do it with you.

We spent the last six years creating the systems that enable that kind of doing on the individual level, especially in ways that people’s organizations tend to silo. There are things that motivate you as a person that your organization may not account for. But at News Futures, you wear your own hat, and there is this wider group of people who know your experience. On the scale of shared understanding, you can begin at 10 — not zero — and what you can do in that context is far more expansive.

You started speaking to the “do-ocracy” element of your work. My sense is y’all were particularly intentional in your design choices tied to how governance works and how you think about roles. Can you speak a bit to the particular “how” of News Futures’ work, and why you made the design choices you did?

Some of figuring this out was organic. I don’t consider myself a governance expert even now, but I certainly wasn’t an expert in collective and consensus processes then. I credit people like Kate Sassoon — we call her Sassy, she’s a straight-up genius at this stuff — who helped us take the things that were working well organically, and, over time, put them into structures that have a deeper reservoir of research and practice.

Sassy introduced the decision-making matrix. It’s essentially a spreadsheet of exactly how categorical decisions are made in News Futures. Some of them are autocratic on purpose: We’re agreeing that, for certain things, the person who is elected to this role needs to be able to decide on their own. But then there are other decisions where it’s always going to be delegative, and others where it’s always going to be based on a supermajority. Making that visible provided clarity for when and how we made joint decisions.

We also have the Gardening Club, an elected body we instituted to support the team and hold News Futures’ highest values at the front of their minds. They function somewhat like a board. But, really, they are meant to represent and reflect the needs and wishes of the community, and they are tasked with tying those needs and wishes into the long-term direction that we’ve set.

I credit Cassie Haynes for the “Gardening Club” name. We could have called it a committee or board. But she challenged us to ask: What does this body actually intend to do? Our answer was: garden. We are tending to the thing that we are cultivating, that we all intend to harvest together. You can find the language of gardening and natural processes everywhere in News Futures.

Beyond the Gardening Club, the Working Groups have become the core of our work. The ideas that emerge at our annual convening are exactly what the working groups drive toward. That’s been the case all along. We used to have these “open space” gatherings, and the ideas that surfaced and were clearly seen as viable and popular across the group became the things that we would collectively fund and work on. The people who had those ideas would either become stewards or find co-stewards to help them run that thing. It’s peer-derived, peer-led, surfaced through a central fund, and essential to how we work.

These are all systems that emerged both organically and with serious help from folks who know the cooperative world. These days, News Futures is the only org in the local news space that is exclusively dedicated to field-building. We don’t focus on publishing or grant-making; we focus on creating relationships between the people who make that stuff work.

Most people haven’t been formed in participatory, self-governing institutions because these institutions have mostly atrophied. Instead, our generation has come up in more transactional, consumptive ones. It sounds like News Futures is rebuilding that kind of formative institution, and I’d guess the people participating in it are being changed by practicing self-governance. Have you seen any of this type of small “d” democratic formation happen at the level of your own membership?

I’m a big fan of sci-fi, and ark ship narratives in particular. For the journalists that see the decline of this dominant system of traditional journalism coupled with the rise of this emergent system of civic information, one of our tasks is to put journalism into places that are more tied to the ground and more explicitly dedicated to material outcomes in people’s lives. We’re finding new worlds for local news — because we see the value journalists can provide when they’re thinking less about “content” and more about community benefits. Journalism is very conducive to producing facilitators and conveners and design thinkers, and the industry tends to use those skills to, instead, produce “stories.” In this new world — come on — there is so much fucking content. There is no amount of content you produce that is going to improve our society.

Except for this interview.

Yeah, this one is different, and we know that.

Back to the point, though: Most journalists want to change the world in some way, and that’s why they get into journalism. They believe in people, they love people, and they want to know people and understand people. And so they naturally want to convene people, and they want to facilitate conversations, and they want to create events and sessions that get people moving and thinking. Those are the new skillsets for journalists, and the future skillsets that we need in our communities.

All the people in News Futures are creating organizations and models and products and ideas that understand this need (and opportunity). Some groups literally do nothing but these various forms of convening and facilitating and answering people’s direct questions and investigating things, but on the human scale that our friends at the Relational Tech Project talk about — of one to ten or one to a hundred, not one to a billion. Other members are building systems and processes and models that enable people to practice self-governance and peer governance. This is interstitial work that people like Jenn Brandel, who is a long-time member of News Futures, have been on for well over a decade.

News Futures members are being formed at multiple levels — by working alongside fellow members as part of News Futures, and through their direct experimental work in communities.

Concepts like “self-governance” and “do-ocracy” and all this stuff are often easier said than done. What’s worked well — and less well — about News Futures’ approach to date?

News Futures has always taken the position that we’re going to focus on our constituency. We aren’t trying to grow it indefinitely, and that just means that we can focus on the people who come in and the word-of-mouth factor. Almost everyone who comes into News Futures has heard about it from someone who invited them there. We want the right people in the room, and the right people are the people who want to be there and who feel connected to the space.

We’ve also remained intentional about basing membership on the individual — not their organization — and tamping down instances where the line gets crossed. This individual-level membership enables the cross-sector nexus that we want to create. There’s an entropy within the journalism space; a lot of it is because we distance ourselves from other people and sectors. So part of our corrective is to say: Let’s reintegrate. There are people working in adjacent spaces who are valuable, valid, and viable information producers and distributors. Our individual-level membership helps create the spaces where we’re jamming with them and coordinating together.

On the other hand, the tension in our size is becoming more real. Our approach works because we are not a shark constantly swimming around looking for food in order to grow. That means our budget is relatively small, but, even so, we’re outgrowing our fiscal sponsorship model. We need to look towards independence, but I don’t want to become yet another nonprofit. So, we’re working with a team of lawyers to figure out a tax status that will align with our governance model and the way we work, and won’t put us into a box that will eventually force News Futures to compete with the organizations in our ecosystem.

The Gardening Club can also be difficult. It’s hard to be in the position of caring deeply about the community and of making strategic decisions, but also knowing when to step back. A lot of us are friends. We have seen each other grow up. We have matured together, and we all see a similar goal, but there are real tensions. They can be productive, but these are relationships that we’re talking about. We’re not an organization. We’re a band of people who love working together, see a common vision together, and are engaged in a peer governance process together. That comes with all kinds of beautiful things, but it can also be tense because we have to learn to be a mini democracy together.

You have a decade-plus of experimentation with these “correctives” like News Futures and City Bureau under your belt. Do you have any hunches on where this work goes next?

These days, I am always willing to put energy into my kid where I used to put it into work. In this beautiful little period where she’s exploding with words and personality and ideas, I’ll put down my work in a heartbeat to think about where we’re gonna go fly our kite next.

That said, I am thinking about where this work can go. All these things — City Bureau, News Futures, Commoner Company — they are one 15-year thread. Now, especially with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) rescission, the question is: How are we going to reimagine public media, and re-learn how to build the movements and alliances that create real public information policy — the kind that won and built institutions like the CPB to begin with? We need to put the public back into public media. What is the version of this that holds true to what journalism should be, but also brings it back to the people who need it most?

The timing is ripe. We have this emergent, energized force of civic media practitioners who are thinking about new alliances. We could have a powerful new way of conceiving public media and information if we were to figure out how to work together and how to broaden the tent of what counts as public media. We have the makings of a sea change. We have a powerhouse of talent, of leadership, of new models, and of older traditional infrastructure. To me, that’s the edge.

Earlier, you described how so much of News Futures language and approach draws inspiration from natural processes. How do you think about applying these natural metaphors when you consider the life cycle of News Futures, itself?

News Futures is open source. Anyone here can use our assets for non-commercial purposes that are aligned with our charter and build the field. Now that we have these assets, this idea of a compostable organization — one that can release all of them back into the world — is really appealing to me. That involves intentionally not putting things behind paywalls, and not feeling the need to own every idea that emerges.

I briefly touched on entropy earlier, and I see a lot of journalism industry groups where entropy has settled in. They’ve grown so big, and so many people’s healthcare and jobs are tied to them, that all they’re able to do is try their best. But then the applications to the fellowship start to dwindle, and the attendance at the events begins to dwindle, and you just slowly become this little dwarf star. You end up with hundreds of these intermediary organizations that only exist because they are still being propped up by philanthropy.

I want to be able to build a functional, structured, efficient, and effective thing that can release its energies and assets back into the field when the time is right. I don’t want to dwindle. I want to go fucking supernova. I want to release everything back out at its peak power, not wait until the lights go dim.

These are strategic and operational considerations, and they run counter to the typical approach to building organizations. We need to understand the makeup of our work so that, when it’s time to release our assets back into the world, we’re actually able to do so, rather than finding ourselves caught in this trap of having to preserve and protect what we’ve been building.

I keep returning to this tension between machine logic and ecological logic as the organizing frame beneath much of what we’ve been discussing. Machine logic builds for immortality — untethered from any natural life cycle — while ecological logic assumes we’re embedded within the natural processes of life, death and composting included.

I see a lot of that natural logic. I’m standing in my garden right now. Earlier this morning, I moved my mint closer to my tomatoes because I read that keeping the mint close to tomatoes reduces the number of aphids and other bugs that are hanging around. I’m about to pull a runner from my strawberry plant and plant some new strawberries. These are all compost-adjacent ideas. How do these things help each other just by co-existing?

Once this life cycle of my basil plant is done, I am going to compost it, and that soil is going to be extremely fertile, and I’m going to use it for my cucumber plant. But that takes commitment to a certain kind of durability, and also a commitment to letting go and not holding it too tightly. It takes a commitment to doing what is good for the garden and not any individual plant.

When I sit in my garden, I feel good, right? And when I think about News Futures as compostable, I feel good. And when I think about bringing people together in our network and letting them do whatever they want with the stuff that they create together, I feel good about that. And so there’s a certain vibe: Does it feel right? Does it feel good? Do people agree it feels good? Let’s do that.

Subscribe now

“Connection is unstructured, unmeasured, and unmonetized. That gap is a market.

The Connection Economy is what’s forming to fill it. It’s not one type of business. It’s a whole category spanning industries that have never really talked to each other… When the institutions that used to deliver belonging for free start to fail, the market steps in … This is the business of human connection. What happens when belonging earns its place in the economy?” - from Belonging Capital

I’m not starting with this quote to put the author on blast — I don’t know her, and I imagine she’s well-intended. I share it because it represents the crispest encapsulation I’ve seen of a dynamic that’s emerged over the last few years: The application of market logic to the historically non-market good of human connection.

Let’s briefly put on our Stanford business school hats to unpack this line of reasoning. The gap between demand for connection and the supply of that connection is the market opportunity. The total size of that market opportunity — the TAM, if you will — is the number of total customers multiplied by their willingness-to-pay for connection. This is how you end up with a “trillion dollar wellness economy … built on connection”: hundreds of millions of lonely people, willing to pay thousands of dollars a year to be less lonely. The market “steps in,” and belonging “earns its place in the economy.”

But this isn’t merely a continuation of premiumization trends that led to the proliferation of country clubs in the 1920s, gated communities in the 1980s, and expensive exercise classes in the 2010s; it’s a step function change in how we organize human relations. By explicitly commercializing some of the most essential ingredients to living a good life — by creating a “category” for belonging and a “market” for connection — we’re both institutionalizing and normalizing human connection as a market good.

So before we build “the business of human connection,” it’s worth asking the question: Should we?

Enter Michael Sandel, whose 2012 book, What Money Can’t Buy, is an invaluable source of wisdom for grappling with this question. His diagnosis is that, over the past several decades, the U.S. has transformed from a market economy to a market society. As he explains, “A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor … where social relations are made over in the image of the market” (p. 11). To Sandel, the application of market values to traditionally non-market goods can both (1) introduce the inequality of money and (2) corrupt those very goods.

This is the risk we face if we passively accept the commercialization and commodification of human connection. The unchecked proliferation of market logic into the social realm would accelerate the significant and growing inequality in our social lives, while simultaneously degrading the higher-order goods of human relationships and community. Not only would the distance between the social haves and have nots continue to increase, but some of the most human things we can do — be in relationship, participate in something bigger than ourselves — risk becoming corrupted beyond repair.

Here’s the thing: We’re not at all destined for the future envisioned by the Connection Economy boosters. My sense is it actually gives a lot of us the heebie-jeebies. So that just means it’s on us to imagine and work toward an alternative future — one where our market relationships serve the public good of our human relationships, and one where we collectively protect the sanctity of our relational lives from being remade in the debased image of the market.

Doubling down on social inequality

Markets run on money, and money often influences the goods in life that we can and cannot access. So when market logic is applied to the realm of human connection, it raises fundamental questions of distributive justice and fairness. Who should get access to relationships, community, and social support? Should this be conditioned upon one’s ability to pay?

These questions matter because human connection is essential to, well, human life. A growing expert consensus (if you’re into that kind of thing) has affirmed the importance of relationships to measurable positive outcomes in pretty much every field. There’s Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s research that found social isolation as a major predictor of premature mortality. There’s Raj Chetty’s research that identified cross-class connections as the greatest predictor of economic mobility in life. And there’s Theda Skocpol’s research on cross-class, federated civic groups serving as the foundation for participatory democracy in America. The list could go on for hundreds of pages. You get the point.

Market logic applied to human connection would dictate that those with the highest willingness and ability to pay should benefit from relationships and community. Remember, the market opportunity the Connection Economy boosters identify is simply this unmet consumer demand multiplied by their willingness-to-pay. But in the conditions of existing inequality, applying this market logic to human connection would only accelerate and compound that inequality. As Sandel explains in What Money Can’t Buy:

In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters … Where all good things are bought and sold, having money makes all the difference in the world ... Not only has the gap between rich and poor widened, the commodification of everything has sharpened the sting of inequality by making money matter more. (pp. 8-9)

In some ways, this dynamic has already been unfolding in the shadows for the past half century. It’s been hidden behind the forces of geographic sorting, the decline of more accessible communities like church, unions, and civic groups, and their concomitant replacement with premium third places and community groups. As more and more of our social and community life becomes “pay-to-play,” those who don’t have the ability to pay increasingly can’t play. The inequality of our economic lives becomes replicated to our social lives, which reinforce each other, ad infinitum.

The much-discussed K-shaped economy is functionally a K-shaped society, organized by class and income. Today, a quarter of people without degrees have no close friends, compared to 10 percent of those with degrees. Americans without degrees are 3 to 4 times less likely to be members of community groups, 12 percent less likely to be members of religious groups, and approximately 15 percent less likely to be married between age 33 and 44. Meanwhile, men without degrees are twice as likely to die by suicide as men with degrees, and the life expectancy gap between Americans with and without degrees is now 8.5 years (and growing).

The boosters of the Connection Economy risk pushing our already historic levels of social inequality into hyperdrive. If they’re successful, they’ll build a whole new ecosystem of pay-to-play social infrastructure — from luxury real estate, to premium social clubs, to $200/hour “friendship coaches” — that may strengthen the already relatively strong relational lives of those who can pay. Meanwhile, for many lower-income Americans, the relational safety net has all but disappeared. Creating a “market for connection” would only make a connected life further out of reach for the very Americans most in need of relational support.

Degrading our relationships (and ourselves)

Applying market logic to human connection also raises moral questions. Should our relationships and communities be commodified? And what happens to these goods when we treat them as instruments of profit and use?

“Markets don’t only allocate goods; they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged,” Sandel writes in What Money Can’t Buy (pp. 9-10). “Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question.”

If philosophy and theology are any guide, human connection, friendship, and community should be valued as higher order goods — not commodities. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sees friendship, particularly “virtue friendship,” as a vital and necessary good in the pursuit of the good life. In Confessions, St. Augustine describes “true friendship” as rooted in and inseparable from a relationship with God. In I and Thou, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber sees an “I-thou” relationship as a reciprocal, non-objectified encounter with another’s whole sacred being. And in “Turtles All The Way Down,” the contemporary musician-philosopher Sturgill Simpson writes, “But I swear that God is there / Every time I glare into the eyes of my best friend.”

By applying market logic to the higher order good of human connection, we fundamentally corrupt and degrade it — that is, we “treat it according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it” (What Money Can’t Buy, p. 34).

Connection being “unstructured, unmeasured, and unmonetized” is the point; when we commodify connection and community, we debase these goods from the sacred to the profane. We reduce relationships from ends in and of themselves to transactional means toward some other end. We vanquish the uncategorizable spirit of relationship — its “thou-ness” as Buber would call it — and replace it with an “it-ness” that can be cleanly categorized, measured, and used. We cede the last place market logic hasn’t fully penetrated — our most cherished relationships and communities — to be “made over in the image of the market.”

“Marketizing a good can change its meaning,” Sandel explains (p. 81), and marketizing connection has the potential for society-wide implications. I’m not talking about little things like AT&T’s neighbor-washing commercial for The World Cup. I’m talking about that “trillion-dollar wellness economy … built on connection,” where the “self care” grift of the 2010s gets run back as the connection grift of the 2020s, and where every conceivable social interaction becomes seen as an opportunity to extract value. And I’m talking about a civic life fully remade in the image of the market, where we squeeze the very “life” out of it by treating it as a controllable, measurable machine rather than the unwieldy, mysterious living ecology it actually is.

This marketization of connection has implications for our personal lives, too. Because connection and community are inseparable from what makes us human, by commodifying them, we also commodify (and debase) ourselves in the process. We start to measure our social worth by the quantifiable number of friends we have, as many “social health” companies are trying to sell us. We start to see our own sense of belonging as a market good that can be bought for the right price, consumed, satisfied, and discarded.

We become connection consumers, gobbling up connection in a connection economy, satiated on our own connectedness, yet completely disconnected from the nonmarket goods of meaning and transcendence that make for a good life.

Defining where markets do belong

If much of the above sounds icky to you, here’s the good news: We’re not locked into a future of commodified connection. We can choose an alternative path — one that affirms human connection and community as goods that money can’t buy. The appropriate approach isn’t necessarily to shun market logic altogether. Rather, it’s to “decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they don’t belong” (p. 14), as Sandel proposes.

Since we do live in a market economy, it behooves us to have a constructive vision for how the markets can serve the public good of human relationships. We need to ask: What role should the market play in our relational lives? This question, it turns out, leads us to a set of guiding principles — informed by centuries of thinking and practice from distributists, mutualists, and agrarians alike — that contrast sharply from the not-so-hidden values underpinning the Connection Economy.

We can start by defining what types of market interactions strengthen human relationships. Here, I’d make the case for active, participatory market relationships over passive, consumptive ones. Consider membership. When paid membership is designed as a pathway to participation, contribution, decision-making, and leadership — a YMCA practicing “deep membership” versus an exercise studio selling packages of classes — it deepens relationships among members and helps them see themselves as active agents rather than passive consumers. This is the mutualist vision of civic alignment, where membership, revenue, and governance all align, creating a virtuous cycle of democratic participants within organizations and across communities.

This directly connects to questions of where market relations are best situated and how power works within the market. Here, place matters, as the agrarians have long held, and more proximate, distributed market relationships are preferable to distant, concentrated ones. Consider ownership. When ownership of a community institution is embedded in the place it serves — a locally-owned coffee shop versus a Starbucks, for instance — owners develop a direct relationship with customers and the community, and they see their fate as intertwined with the community’s fate. When customers are also your neighbors, and your market is also your home, it creates an ethos of responsibility for, stewardship of, and accountability to your community’s well-being.

Or, consider the concept of scale. A distributist vision of scale sees it as millions of local businesses across tens of thousands of places, iteratively responding to the particular needs of their particular places and neighbors. An industrial vision of scale sees it as one centralized, top-down corporation entering hundreds of new markets to meet the untapped demand of millions of consumers. Distributist scale is responsive, particular to, and regenerative of human-scale relationships and communities, whereas industrial scale is often an impositional, abstracting, and extractive force. Compare a small-town general store to a Dollar General, and you’ll realize the difference is night and day. The former serves as a bedrock of community life, the latter strip mines it.

When market interactions are active, embedded, and distributed in this way, it changes our conceptions of who our constituencies are and the nature of our market relationships. Constituencies are no longer seen as an abstract national (or international) customer base defined by their willingness-to-pay. Instead, they become a particular set of members or neighbors defined by their willingness-to-participate. The nature of market interactions are no longer seen as contingent — that is, lasting only as long as the business and customer want to continue the transaction. Instead, they become defined by commitment: market relationships become communal relationships, and they are made durable by a shared commitment to place. Whereas the Connection Economy breeds sorting and using, this economy facilitates neighborly solidarity and reciprocity.

Protecting our relational lives from market logic

But in a society where market values are already so dominant, determining where markets don’t belong is harder than determining where they do. Building an economy that strengthens our relational lives is only part of the equation. We still have a thornier question to tackle: Where (and how) should our relational lives be protected from market logic?

This question carries significant spiritual and moral force, and implications both personal and communal. That’s because protecting our relational lives from market values is more than just a structural task; it must also involve recovering (or sustaining) a sense of the sacred. A great buffer against a belief system that sees the world as a finite set of material resources to be controlled, used, and consumed is one that sees it as an abundance of mysterious relationships to be stewarded.

This calls us to resist seeing ourselves as mere machine-like market actors, and rather see ourselves as living members of a morally ordered cosmos. When we see our fellow humans as being made in the image of God — or emerging from and part of some sacred life force we all share — it becomes much harder to treat individuals and communities as means to some other end. And when we see ourselves as inheritors of gifts — our natural, communal, and cultural ecosystems — we become much more likely to see ourselves as responsible for protecting, stewarding, and preserving those gifts.

Indeed, these communal gifts also require protection from market thinking. To do this, we must approach our families, communities, and institutions as sites of moral and spiritual formation. If we don’t, market values seep in, and they become sites of “great malformation.” In a pluralistic society, the what and how of this moral formation must vary by place and culture. But what matters is we create and sustain small “pockets of sanity” — in our families, our interpersonal relationships, our neighborhoods, our community groups, and our houses of worship — where the instrumental, transactional values of the market can’t penetrate. We cultivate and protect spaces where, to again quote Sandel, “money’s writ [does] not run.”

Wendell Berry has been writing about the stakes of unchecked market forces corrupting our relationships — human, communal, natural, and cosmic alike — for the better part of six decades. To him, this personal and communal protection is among our foremost responsibilities as members of the entire living universe, which he calls “Great Economy”:

For a human, the good choice in the Great Economy is to see its membership as a neighborhood and oneself as a neighbor within it … in the membership of the Great Economy everything signifies; whatever we do counts. If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys. We can presume that we are outside the membership that includes us, but that presumption only damages the membership — and ourselves, of course, along with it. (“Two Economies,” pp. 234-235 in The Art of The Commonplace)

Perhaps the only trait I can claim to have in common with Berry and Sandel is a reluctance to offer the quick fix or silver bullet solution. None of this is easy. Protecting our relational lives from market values sounds hard because it is. So, too, is building an economy that serves the public good of human relationships.

Fortunately, we have agency and we have time. We are not passive recipients of a market economy being imposed on us; we are active members of a Great Economy that we can steward and sustain. And we are not running out of time, for the time-scale of this membership has always been measured in generations, not quarters or fiscal years. So, we have a choice: Participate in a generational project of membership that coheres and endures, or succumb to a craze of consumption that disintegrates and destroys.

Let’s choose the former. Let’s choose to see connection being “unstructured, unmeasured, and unmonetized” not as a market gap, but as a manifestation of the mysterious messiness of human relationships. Let’s choose to resist a Connection Economy and instead commit to building an economy that deepens connection. Let’s choose to collectively stand our ground and say: relationships, friendship, and community are sacred goods that money can’t buy.

Subscribe now

Read more

When we published “A simple act to strengthen civic life” last September, our expectations were, well, simple.

We (Josh and Sam) thought we might introduce people to the idea of microgrants — lil’ baby grants of $50 to $250 — for neighbors to gather with neighbors. We thought we might help people understand why microgrants for neighbor gatherings work. And, through our small fund, we thought we’d get 50 or so people to host neighbor gatherings themselves.

Yes, all of that did happen. People were jazzed about the concept, the piece, and getting money to host their neighbors. But as we fielded dozens of calls throughout the fall, we realized people were even more jazzed about something bigger and better: Launching their own neighbor gathering microgrants in their own hometowns.

From Chicago to Orlando, San Francisco to Johnson City, people had visions for what these microgrants could do for the places they called home. But much like hosts needed the small permission structure of the microgrant to gather their neighbors, so too did these local organizers need a permission structure to launch a microgrant initiative of their own.

So we put our heads together and asked, “What could this permission structure look like?” Then, we phoned a friend, Elise Granata of GROUP HUG fame, to join us in this exploration, and invited in a small group of local microgrant organizers to help us co-design an approach. Collectively, we dreamed up the next iteration of With Neighbors: this time, to support a nationwide wave of local microgrant initiatives for neighbors to gather with neighbors.

Today, with the generous support of the Hearthland Foundation, we’re inviting you to join in. Start by checking out the neighborhood microgrant toolkit for everything you need to begin organizing your local microgrant initiative. Then sign up to learn alongside others interested in launching these microgrants in the places they call home.

We also think this microgrant experiment is getting at something even bigger. It’s a model for how practices can be spread memetically, with inspiration and support, to align with our vision for a new civic future — one built on local relationships, local participation, and particular places, and one where more people in more places can contribute to strengthening local civic life, more durably over time.

So, consider this piece, co-written by the three of us, a two-fer. It’s an invitation to join our With Neighbors microgrant experiment, and it’s our early attempt to describe the principles and practices that underpin this experiment (and, potentially, many more).

Get The Toolkit

Finding and spreading civic memes

-Sam Pressler of Connective Tissue

Most of our culture — even our beloved civic culture — is downstream of memes.

Just as shows and movies were the fundamental unit of culture of the television era, memes are the fundamental unit of culture of the smartphone and social media era. Today, culture is spread memetically — horizontally, diffusely, and uncontrollably through networks — rather than from the top-down through established, controlled channels.

We had an early “aha” moment when we realized microgrants for neighbor gatherings are a civic meme. They’re irresistible cultural practices — a mix of simple, useful, fun, catchy, and copy-able — that spread organically and can be adapted repeatedly to local contexts. The very irresistibility of the practice makes people want to share it with others and try it locally. Its perceived adaptability, meanwhile, encourages people to apply their own flavor to fit with local culture. This makes lateral diffusion the mechanism for spreading civic memes, where the only limiting factor is people’s appetite to share and adapt the cultural practice.

But civic memes don’t just happen; they take some curation. I first heard about microgrants for neighbor gatherings when doing research for the Connective Tissue Policy Framework. I noticed a pattern: from Boston’s microgrants for block parties, to Warm Cookies of the Revolution’s microgrants for “Civic House Parties” in Colorado, people were using microgrants to simply bring neighbors together. The first thing I thought was, “This should be happening in every community.” Then, “Why not try it on for size where I live?”

So I learned from Nathalia Benitez-Perez in Boston and Evan Weissman and Erica Dorn in Colorado. I designed the initiative to fit my local context (and constraints) in Charlottesville. I launched it as a pilot, then documented how it worked, what happened, what we learned, and our lingering questions in this piece. This created coherence to a set of practices that, prior, were not necessarily seen as connected.

I didn’t create the meme. But I did identify it, adapt it, and help spread it. Perhaps my story will turn out to be an early spark in a long, weird, uncontrollable line of others who find microgrants for neighbor gatherings too irresistible not to try where they live.

Believing you can do it

-By Elise Granata of GROUP HUG

Somewhere between irresistibility and doing the thing lurks believing it can actually happen in your town, too. We’ve all had the experience of pining over a story about stoop coffees or free community CPR classes and thought: sure, that’s easy enough for people who live in [insert walkable/urban/cool/moneyed/politically or demographically homogenous or descriptors like them here] places, but what about where I live, which is not at all like that?

Building belief begins with identifying a first step. That’s where our toolkit comes in. While I love a good toolkit (ask me for my powerpoint roasting toolkits), their power is partly symbolic. Sure, it’s helpful to see exactly how you might fundraise for your microgrant or go about selecting recipients, but what’s more meaningful is that this experience can be broken down into discrete steps at all. It’s not just for a well-resourced, magical other to pull off. How impossible could it be if it has steps?

Belief is also moored in knowing you’re not alone. That’s why creating collective identity among organizers — whether you’re seasoned or just beginning (join in here!) — is so motivating. Half of it is simple camaraderie: you’re organizing a microgrant, I’m organizing a microgrant, we’re both scrapping with the same challenges. And as this feeling grows across more organizers from more places and more contexts, the format itself becomes more adoptable. Think: Little Free Libraries. You don’t just have a wooden box of books in your front yard — you belong to a movement all across the world.

Practicing alongside others gives us role models. We need to see rural organizers and people drumming something up in towns you’ve never heard of and everyday people without a bigger org or affiliation backing them up. Just as the example of Boston dedicating an entire office to civic life might ratchet up our long-term vision for what’s possible, a scrappy flyer design for a microgrant made by a single neighbor in eastern Pennsylvania might remind us that it doesn’t need to be so formal to exist. In my early conversations with microgrant organizers, one of my favorite nuggets to drop was the example of NOFA-VT’s Long-Handled Spoon Dinners. The genius of this intimate dinner format inspired some organizers to get specific, to see a theme as a propulsive creative constraint, and to be less afraid to create something that could only happen where they live.

Diffusion becomes more possible through…actual diffusion, not doubling down on one example crafted in an ideal environment. Formats get better with stress testing alongside others doing the same thing as you: trying it on for size, breaking them in, and hacking them to fit your context.

Building and sharing the commons

-By Josh Nesbit of the Relational Tech Project (RTP)

Diffusion, trying it on for size, hacking — these days, this all takes some technology. Yes, the tech of recent decades has often isolated us, homogenized our experience of our places, and seized our attention. But at RTP, we believe we can all ask our technology to do the opposite: to strengthen relationships instead of replacing them, to reflect local cultures instead of flattening them, to facilitate shared stewardship instead of concentrating ownership.

So, we (, , and I) are building the tech for these microgrants differently. That means designing for memetic spreading and remixing, and developing the infrastructure for an attributable, open-source civic commons.

We see diffusion more like “remixing” than simple copy-paste replication. Anyone can remix a microgrant system, helping it spread and adapt from one place to another. We’ve already seen this happen among the small group of organizers we’ve been building alongside. After one organizer in Chicago wanted a multi-lingual site and unique landing pages for each language, three other organizers adopted the idea. Specific reflection questions are spreading across programs, facilitated by the tech, and, soon, enabling collective sensemaking of what’s unfolding nationally.

Building together and sharing back what we learn enables us to create an open-source civic commons — one we can all draw from and contribute to. Soon, any microgrant organizer anywhere will be able to access everything from site templates, to question banks, to quality-assured payment rails, all sourced from organizers themselves. Such a commons becomes a living site of shared wisdom — one model informs another, one tool informs the next — which helps strengthen our collective civic practice.

Committing to sharing a commons also commits us to sharing credit where credit’s due. We’re building an attribution system that accounts for the reality that these neighborhood microgrants — like so many of our civic practices — have been inspired and informed by others. So we’re making the lineage of ideas visible through simple things like README files and footer credits. That way, if you host a “Civic House Party” microgrant in your hometown, you can attribute Warm Cookies of the Revolution. Just like musicians give credit to their musical influences, our civic artists can give credit to their civic influences.

It’s not about building the single microgrant system for everyone to use, and then packaging it and selling it back to communities. It’s about having a fire for others to light their kindling, to take back to their own fireplaces.

Adapting it locally

Our shared civic future can be just that: shared and civic. We can be inspired by what people are doing in other places. We can adapt what they’re doing — with attribution — in the places we call home. We can turn these shared practices into shared learnings, all contributing to a shared commons of civic memes that we all own.

It’s not like we have a viable alternative. More “silver bullet” solutions designed behind closed doors and imposed on communities aren’t the answer. If we’re at the start of a 100-year project of civic renewal, it’ll take millions of people testing, diffusing, adapting, and remixing hundreds of smaller civic practices and memes to realize it.

Microgrants for neighbor gatherings are one such civic meme, and you can be one of those people who adapts it locally.

Dig into the toolkit for steps, templates, tips, and tricks. Sign up to learn alongside others — microgrant curious and microgrant organizers alike. Launch an initiative where you live, and add your local flavor to it. You’ll be taking a small but revolutionary step to strengthen the civic life of your community, and you’ll be joining dozens (then hundreds, then thousands) of others doing the same nationwide.

Every town can have a neighborhood microgrant. We can all make it happen.

Join In

Our conversation pulled on several threads related to this central theme of home. How have our modern, Western societies created experiences of the world that can feel so alienating and atomizing? Why is loneliness better understood as a form of world decay rather than a subjective preference for better relationships? Why does Ian see the answer to this loneliness not in connection, but in the process of becoming participants? And, how has writing this book shaped Ian’s own sense of at-homeness in the world?

Ian has been such a generous friend, confidante, and co-conspirator over the years, and I’m grateful to be able to share his work with y’all. Please consider giving the full interview a read, and if it piques your interest, consider purchasing To Arrive Where We Started.

-Sam

PS: Connective Tissue members can join Ian for our “Beyond Bob Book Club” the week of July 27th, where we’ll be reading and discussing his book. You can RSVP here to reserve your spot, and, if you’re not a member yet, you can join here.

Share

This book isn’t about God per se, but something resembling God seems to be the connective tissue that holds the book together. So, to start, how would you begin to describe your relationship with God today? How has it changed?

You son of a bitch. Wow. I realize that I’m being cutesy in the book, and I’m saying, “Oh, you should connect with God, or something like that.” I want spirituality — I think it’s good and necessary — but I want to be non-prescriptive about the form it takes.

My religious background is intense. In my mid 20s, my Protestant evangelical faith started to falter. I was studying in Oxford for a year — reading a lot of beautiful Catholic philosophy and literature — and converted when I was 25. Then, in my early 30s, I got divorced, and my whole world blew apart, including my faith. The two had been closely bound up, and my sense at the time was that I had been forcibly propping up a religious faith that couldn’t stand on its own. It had seemed impossible to not believe: it had been a foundational part of my experience of reality for my whole life. As a result I couldn’t ask genuine questions; I needed certain things to be true. So when everything fell apart, I let it all go at once.

I had a long decade of wandering. I was pretty nihilistic. But I had children, so I couldn’t kill myself and I soldiered on. Through all that, the art that appealed to me continued to be deeply spiritual works, like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or T.S. Elliot‘s poem, The Four Quartets. I often found myself thinking along with religious people and feeling a lot in common with them. Over the past few years, I have become convinced that there is subjectivity — or, we could say, personality — in the world that is not human-like. I feel that it’s benevolent, and that it’s the force that courses through things and animates things. And I feel some contact with it, especially in nature.

I’ve been in a process of trying to understand whether Christianity is the right language and structure to put that in. I’m making progress in that direction. My wife and I attend an Episcopalian monastery for church here in Cambridge, and I meet monthly with the superior of the monastery for spiritual direction. I am, over time and somewhat gingerly, finding my way back into Christianity. At this point, I would call myself a Christian, but I’m still working out the details.

It sounds like you’ve been searching, and that searching nature is reflected in the book itself. But how would you begin to describe the core question that animates To Arrive Where We Started? What deeper truth were you hoping to uncover — whether for yourself or others — in writing this book?

Are we actually at home here? Is this actually a good place? Are we actually a good thing?

The book is definitely both for myself and for others. My concern with the sociological phenomena of anomie and homelessness and loneliness is deeply connected to my own experiences, and my own frustrated sense of feeling cut off from some unity that I should be experiencing. In writing, I was attempting to sort these things out and see what I think about them.

I did some persuasive work on myself. Before writing the book, I had the things that I ultimately argued out as intuitions and suspicions. But I firmed them up for myself in the process of writing. The view of oneself as an integral part of this larger, very good whole increasingly seems to me to be the sensible, realistic view of things. It is just blocked from appearing that way by a lot of the thought patterns that have shaped modern life, including my own.

So I’m trying to preach to myself here. I’m trying to see through many of the patterns of thought that mark our time and place, and to see through them in my day-to-day life, so that when I’m walking around, I don’t feel alienated and lonely.

As I was reading your book, I kept returning to the concept of givenness — that life is a gift to be received, that we are born into and will die with a set of debts that can never be repaid. Why do you feel like this thread emerged so strongly in your book? How does it relate to the human search for home in the world?

An important way we are gradually taught to not feel at home in the world is the sense that reality is fundamentally tit-for-tat — that you receive a good thing only insofar as you have some way to pay for it. For instance, we live at a distance from the miraculous ways that plants grow out of soil and animals grow. I have access to an abundance of produce and meat at the Whole Foods around the corner, but that only comes to me if I can pay. There’s intentionally no generosity.

The fundamental fact is we don’t understand how these processes work. We can describe photosynthesis at an increasingly micro level. But we’re still describing something that happens itself — without which we couldn’t live and with which we can live in a fruitful and beautiful way. Our existence and our sustenance are these miraculous self-generated gifts. The extent to which we’ve been cut off from this truth is an important mechanism in our exile.

Recovering a sense of at-homeness is going to be important. First for finding a better way to live on the personal level — less lonely, less desperate, less stressed — but also in the way we structure our common life. We need to recover the sense that, “Hey, we’re part of one big thing. It’s good, and we’re recipients of it.” Life doesn’t need to be understood as this desperate dog-eat-dog struggle.

What you’re saying sounds good in theory, but for people living in industrial modernity, it can also feel unattainably utopian. But, in the book, you point to several examples of what this wholeness looks like when instantiated within human societies. Did you encounter any that you were particularly inspired or moved by?

You run the danger of sounding cliched if you say this, but a lot of indigenous ways of life live in full confrontation with the realities I’m talking about.

You can read relatively recent accounts from the 1960s, where anthropologists are describing the worldview and way of life of indigenous groups. They talk about the forest, for instance, as loving and providing for them. I spent a little time with a group in Uganda that traditionally has no method of storing goods for the future — they have no interest in it, and, in some cases, no words for it — because they have this ongoing sense of the generosity of reality. They have this sense that there will be enough tomorrow, and if we’re a little hungry for one afternoon, the forest will eventually take care of us. I also write about the Lakota in the book. They are hunters and gatherers, so they kill animals to eat, but they also have a ceremony where they give thanks to the animal. They realize that this is a great gift the animal has given its life so that they can continue to live.

You don’t even have to look very hard — if you get outside of the frame of the past 200-300 years in Western Europe — to find cultures that have a core ethos of gratitude and reciprocity. There’s an economic historian named Karl Polanyi, who says that the striving for personal monetary gain has been relatively scarce in human economic history. For the most part, you would engage in trade and production, but the goal was not to pile up as much as you could for yourself. The goal was to keep your place inside the group by sharing and exchanging, and in that way, you could feel assured that you would be okay. Things like insurance are modern attempts to patch over the loss of that tribal reciprocal form of economics. Traditionally, your insurance policy would be that you’ve been a good member of the tribe — and you’ve been generous when it was your turn to be generous — so when you needed something, you would get it.

Polanyi talks about how individual starvation was essentially unheard of in pre-modern economies. One member of the group starving while the rest of the group had food would be preposterous to tribal societies. The only way you would encounter starvation would be if there was a famine and the group was starving. During the period of colonization, in order to goad indigenous groups into working for wages for the colonizers, they had to destroy communities and traditional means of sustenance. By opening up the possibility that an individual might starve, you have power. You can say, “You have to work for me and for this wage, because, if you don’t, your body is not going to get enough food, and you are going to die.”

Your book also has echoes of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and pretty much every essay by Wendell Berry. There’s a consistent, underlying critique of the machine logic of industrial modernity. Can you draw out the distinctions between a mechanistic cosmos versus an alive cosmos? What are the implications for how we live?

Hans Jonas was a German Jewish philosopher who argued that the idea of a cold, indifferent, machine-like cosmos was an absolute novelty in human history over the past couple hundred years. There were various times and places where you might understand nature as being fickle or angry with you. It was more common to think that you lived in a positive social relationship with the natural world. In either case, it was something you could cope with. But for humans to imagine that we stand alone in the cosmos — that caring and value only exists inside our skulls, and then the rest of it is unthinking mechanism — Jonas says this is the true abyss. This exposes us to a nihilism that we can’t recover from.

I keep saying that the dog-eat-dog arrangements we put in place are totally unnecessary. This wasn’t the way humans used to act, and it’s not the way humans act in some places now, so why would we do this to ourselves?

My inclination is not to denounce various people for greed. People are generally doing their best. People are acting on the assumptions and incentives that they’ve been given. So I try to understand this rapaciousness in a sympathetic light. The best I can come up with is that humans have these ways of making themselves at home in the cosmos, but it tends to involve having a more holistic picture of your place within it. It’s not just me against the world; I am integrally embedded in and a part of this thing. But if everything outside of the human head is just cold unthinking mechanism, then it’s much harder to be a meaningful participant.

We still want to be at home though. We don’t want to be racked with fear and insecurity and alienation. So we cope by trying to manufacture a home around ourselves. Often, we do this by accumulating wealth and power, which gives us the capacity to inspire friendlike behaviors from people. If you pay them money, then they will give you a ride. They will protect you. They will bring you food. They will heal you when you’re sick. These are all things that presumably would have been done by fellow tribesmen.

But if the world is this strange place, and we are strangers within it, then it creates an additional urgency to getting and keeping as much as you can. You might become willing to do some pretty nasty stuff, like hurting others or harming the community you’re a part of, to get even more. To me, that’s an expression of a spiritual sickness and a deep loneliness and a belief that, “I need to force reality to be good to me.”

You’ve used the term “loneliness” a few times now. I’ve been fairly critical of the “loneliness epidemic” frame — basically, that I don’t think it exists. But you leveled a fundamentally different critique of the very conception of loneliness that underpins how we think about the so-called “loneliness epidemic.” How would you begin to explain your conception of loneliness, and your critique of the dominant frame?

The dominant frame is a discrepancy frame. We know there are lots of wacky facts like living in a house full of loving family members is not necessarily protective against loneliness, and being by oneself in a mountain retreat is not necessarily lonely-making. This puts the word “lonely” at risk of not having much meaning at all. So, what social scientists have done is peg it to some arbitrary personal point of preference, “Well, if you’re lonely in a home full of loving family members, you must want a different kind of sociality than the one available to you.” It’s a definition that centers on the discrepancy between your desired social life and the one that you have, which, to me, seems so thin and simple that it’s basically true.

But it doesn’t make sense of the devastating impact of loneliness. There are all sorts of preferences you have that are unrealized in your actual life, but they’re not psychologically and physically devastating like loneliness can be. Loneliness can peel years off your life. Loneliness can inhibit cellular repair functions. It strikes me as much more of an unmet need than an unmet arbitrary desire. So I compare it to malnutrition and try to ask, “What nutrition are we giving one another? In what way can a mature, well-fed, self-sustaining animal need others of his kind around him?” Because if he lacks them, he could die.

The argument I try to unpack is this: The human being’s sense of self and world is incredibly complex, flexible, and dynamic, and the way we’ve evolved to make sense of our reality is so complex that we can’t do it alone. You need relatively constant input from other minds around you to make sense of who and what you are and what you ought to do. One spot you can see this is in the experience of solitary confinement. It’s widely understood that extended periods in solitary confinement result in an undoing of oneself and one’s world, where the isolated prisoner loses contact with reality. Maybe he forgets who he is. Sometimes he may be doing arbitrary physical harm to himself, and then when asked later why he did that, he’ll say, “I don’t know, I didn’t know it was me that I was hurting.”

We need people to share our world with us. We need people to help us live in it, tend it, and evolve it over time. If you’re deprived of that world-sharing, then your world starts to come apart and decay. I try to understand loneliness as being precisely that: world decay. You can be alone as long as your world and yourself are staying intact. But at a certain point, for anyone, too much aloneness will start to decay that world.

You intentionally resist shallow solutions in the book. But you do provide a compass for a way out, which seems to involve a mix of what you call world-tending and becoming participants in the broader whole.

If, first of all, I come to understand myself as an integral participant in a larger whole that is good — not as an autonomous island that needs to defend itself at all costs against the people and reality around it — it then comes with a prescription that’s built in: I’m part of this reality now, and I bear some responsibility for it.

In the book, I share examples of modern people having conversion experiences where they’re overwhelmed by this perception of participation and at-homeness in reality. Then they’ll say, “Once you recognize yourself as part of the river, now you realize you’re responsible for the river as a whole.” That, to me, is the sane and non-suicidal path forward from our current attitudes and arrangements.

But is reality cold and indifferent? Is it a place where we are truly at home and we’re participants in a good way? You can’t be argued into answers to these fundamental questions; they’re questions you have to live through. For that reason, the only thing I counsel in the book is a different kind of attention. I’m pulling from Simone Weil, who has a beautiful description of attention as something like “open waiting for reality to penetrate it.”

This is all pretty woo woo, I realize, but we’re in a moment where the question of whether all matter is conscious is becoming a legitimate mainstream question in philosophy and in the sciences. There’s a growing openness to this because the paradigm that locks us into our individual skulls is inaccurate. It requires us to ignore much about reality, and it locks us into hyper-competitive, thoughtless, heedless ways of living that feel self-destructive to many right now. If the book resonates with people, it’ll be because it’s surfing on a wave that’s already taking shape — that people are already getting disenchanted with the machine-like model of reality and are looking for an alternative.

The book ends with a few of the conversion experiences you just referenced, which leads you to a moving meditation on beauty and death:

The virtuosity of life is all the more striking—it might even seem miraculous—when it emerges in a context that also foregrounds its fragility. Here we all are, for a few short moments—tiny, brittle, ignorant, and unspeakably beautiful participants in a drama we could not hope to fully comprehend. Confronted with this juxtaposition, Havel suddenly, unexpectedly receives the intuition that behind the facade of ubiquitous flux, a limitless, invisible reality exists, one in which we are all participants. (p. 152)

Someone doesn’t write a book like this — and end a book like this — without themselves being transformed. You alluded to this in the beginning, so I want to ask it to close us out: How has writing this book affected your relationship with the beauty and frailty of life, and what it means to be at home in the world?

There’s this quip that I heard when I was in grad school, which is that most people are writing a dissertation in hopes of saving their souls. I tend towards living in my own head and being quite isolated from reality, so I wrote a book about being at home in reality. It’s something I have struggled with, and continue to struggle with.

I’ve convinced myself enough that it has started to make a material difference in my day-to-day life. These days, I attempt to be more present. I attempt to not look away from the incompleteness and fragility and mortality of the things around me. I attempt to be present with the imperfect people and imperfect places around me, and not flee away from them into my head, which has been my lifelong instinct. I just finished reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies in a reading group with a bunch of undergrads, and it emphasizes a lot of the same points. Over time, I am walking in a closer and more sensitive proximity to the imperfect and good world.

Can you close us out with a passage from Duino Elegies?

Here’s a stanza from the First Elegy. It captures Rilke’s Romantic sense that we exist in a reciprocal, mutually-nourishing relationship with reality, and his frustration at our fearful inability to look our fragile, mortal world in the face:

Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star

was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you

out of the distant past, or as you walked

under an open window, a violin

yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

But could you accomplish it? Weren’t you always

distracted by expectation, as if every event

announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place

to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you

going and coming and often staying all night.)

Subscribe now

Read more

This week, we’re interviewing ourselves. We wanted to share our personal reflections on the project — both Soren’s perspective as the lead interviewer and Sam’s perspective as the one responsible for making sense of what we heard. We explored many threads throughout the conversation, including:

• What it felt like, emotionally, for us to do this research

• Why we chose a purely qualitative research approach for this project

• What we learned, and what surprised us about what we learned

• And, importantly, whether we’re still friends at the end of this project

This is our first published Connective Tissue Q&A with video. It’s an experiment, so we encourage you to watch it and let us know what you think. If you can’t watch the video, no problem: We’ve included a lightly edited transcript below for you to read.

From the start of this project, we’ve felt a responsibility to steward these men’s experiences with the respect they deserve. We’ve been grateful and heartened that so many of you have done the same.

-Sam + Soren

Share

Sam: Something that surprised me in reading the transcripts was how emotional the conversations got — these guys really did open up. Is that something you expected? Were you trying to drive towards it? What was it like being in that virtual room as the interviewer, meeting these guys through an Ipsos re-contact survey while they were disclosing some of the most personal, vulnerable, sometimes heartbreaking experiences of their lives?

Soren: Yeah, I expected it to be a lot harder to draw out than it was, and I was shocked and incredibly impressed, honestly, with how vulnerable these guys were willing to be with me. Again, they met me minutes ago over Zoom. I gave a quick spiel as far as the admin side of this interview goes, and then jumped right into it. And the vast majority of guys were willing to, immediately, from the get-go, talk about some very vulnerable and emotional things with me, share some stuff that I think they even might hold closer in their personal lives. They were just very willing to talk about that stuff, and that realization fed a lot into the findings that we had. These guys are much more emotionally open and vulnerable than a lot of people assume them to be. But that doesn’t mean you need to be vulnerable and share all that stuff with a stranger on the internet that you just met. It was very impressive, and I think it speaks a lot to these guys’ strength.

Sam: Can you take me to a specific emotional moment in an interview that stands out to you?

Soren: Yeah, there are a lot. But one stands out, towards the end of the interview process. I talked to a man named Jorge who was in his late 30s, I think early 40s, maybe. And he’s divorced. He had a daughter that he saw occasionally, but he had moved from the place he grew up to Rhode Island, where he hadn’t known anybody in several years, and his relational life was nearly nonexistent. In the beginning of the interview, I think he was a little bit more closed off and was just answering the questions, but we started to dig into what that felt like as somebody who used to have a more robust relational life, and it had left and atrophied and dissolved. The way that he talked about what that felt like to him, and how much he yearned for somebody to connect with, was pretty affecting. He talked a lot about one friend he had met online through playing video games — someone he had only known digitally — but they had become very close over the years. They talked multiple times a week on the phone. It was a deep, deep emotional friendship. And that was, in his words, the one person that he talked to day to day. He was very, very appreciative of that, and it was obviously doing a lot for him, but it left him wanting something more. The way he voiced that, the way he talked about it, was just incredibly vulnerable. And it made me very appreciative of the relational life that I am fortunate enough to have. I thought a lot about that in the coming days.

Soren: Did that come across for you? Reading through the transcripts, listening to the interviews — how did that make you think about your own relationships, your marriage, your own friendships?

Sam: Yeah, it had a really significant effect, to be honest. I think it’s unavoidable not to map some of these guys’ stories onto your own relationships. And I have one friend who I definitely mapped some of these stories onto — particularly the way he blames himself for his isolation and then feels that he has to fix himself. Since going through this project and this research, I’ve spent a lot more time just trying to pump up and bring him out so he doesn’t feel like he’s the only person responsible for doing it.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about this idea of relationships as gifts to be inherited, rather than entrepreneurial prizes to be earned. I’ve been thinking about the generational inheritances I’ve had relationally through my family life — growing up in a community where my whole family was around, being embedded in the institutions that my father and grandparents came up in. I was born into a foundation that made relationship formation and community participation much easier because I had people who were calling me in rather than me having to figure it out for myself. Some of these interviews, as contrasts, really crystallized how much harder it would have been for me, and how much I’ve taken for granted from that experience.

Soren: Yeah, did you think about that before? Was that top of mind for you before this project? Because class was a big part of this study and our question sets, but the inheritance of a relational life and the inheritance of social circles — frankly, that wasn’t something that I fully appreciated before doing this.

Sam: The honest answer is you look at these things from so many different angles, but at a certain point you’ve heard everything. And so it was something that I understood in the back of my mind, right? That one of the most important forms of connection from which we’ve been disconnected is generational connection. But I think having so many of these conversations, and seeing those patterns play out or not play out, took it from a back-of-mind thing to something that is much more present now. Just to be very concrete: I think the one genuinely flourishing man we spoke with is this archetypal example of generational inheritance and generational stewardship. Roger — he was born into a family and religious community life where he was receiving relationships, receiving habits of participation. He then realized his own leadership in that family and in religious and community life. And then he sees it as a core purpose to steward and pass that on to his children so that they can inherit it as well.

And that, frankly, couldn’t have been more distant from the kind of mean experience of the men we spoke with. For most of the guys, it was this real feeling of benefiting from the structure of high school and having friendships through high school, losing that one structure of social interaction, and then not having anything to replace it. And so building connection became this entirely individualistic endeavor, often from a place of deficit: less time, less money, and — crucially — fewer existing relationships. Because the number one thing that helps you build relationships is other relationships.

Soren: Yeah, that makes sense.

Sam: So, to me, a surprise was the emotional openness piece we talked about earlier. I know you said something similar, that in a positive way it kind of caught you off guard: “Oh wow, these guys are really willing to open up.” I think we both had preconceived notions going into the interview process, like anyone does. But I’m curious, maybe outside of that emotional piece that we were speaking to, is there anything else from your experience as an interviewer that surprised you or challenged your expectations going in?

Soren: Yeah, I was very shocked that in all of the interviews, the topic of politics and digital media — or even the internet broadly — rarely came up. We purposefully didn’t ask about it, because it would have taken over the conversation and added a lens we didn’t want. But you would assume that even in talking about other subjects it would come in, right? Everyone is so dominated by media these days. Politics is so present in everyone’s minds. Maybe it’s because that’s the world I was in before, so I just assume everyone thinks about this stuff all the time, and they probably don’t.

Sam: You’re actually the crazy one.

Soren: I learn every day that I’m actually the weirdo and everyone else is quite normal. But I was just very surprised that it didn’t come up. I think the biggest open door for it was the role model and mentor aspect of it. That was the only time it did come up, and guys talked about people that they watched online, a lot of content online meant to provide some sort of shape to masculinity. But beyond that, it just didn’t. And it certainly challenged my assumption that this stuff is dominant in everyone’s mind day to day. I’m sure if I’d asked about it once, we could have talked about it for an hour, but it wasn’t what everyone blamed all their problems on. I thought that it would be. And I still believe that it is the source of a lot of problems in our society — the digital media part, the screen time, everything that goes along with that — but the fact that it wasn’t hyper-present in what they answered with, I think, is encouraging.

Sam: Yeah, reading through, you saw glimmers of online life — video games, for example — right in the background. When we asked the close friendship question, there was definitely a small sub-thread of people who said, “I have friends who I’ve never met in person. I met him on Zoom, I met him through a video game, I met him through an online forum.” So it was there. But, with maybe the exception of Jorge and maybe one other person, very rarely did they consider those online relationships close friendships. Very rarely did they consider those online “communities” real communities. They would often say, “Yeah, it’s just kind of a sporadic thing I do online, but it’s not a real community. We don’t meet in person.”

And so I found the absence of even taking online community seriously, and online friendships seriously, surprising to me. Because sometimes, in this discourse, you’ll hear: “Well, we shouldn’t say that online community is worse or online relationships are worse, because there are people from marginalized backgrounds who are actually really finding community and friendship online.” And I 100% believe that’s true. But what’s notable is that we are talking to guys who elite liberals would call “marginalized” and none of these guys are saying, “I found my home through online communities.”

Soren: Yeah, I think there’s a lot to it, and I think it does add something. Jorge is one of the shining examples there. It obviously is more than zero, right? It’s not a completely absent relationship, even with the people who haven’t ever met friends they’ve made online. But even the folks who had them would be the first ones to tell you that it wasn’t enough. It was something, but it didn’t provide everything that they wanted. And so that’s probably one of the questions I’m most conflicted about: What do you do about those online relationships? It’s clearly better than nothing, but it’s not enough. So how do you wrap your head around it?

Sam: It seems like there’s a “yes, and” approach where we shouldn’t say those online relationships are normatively bad. And to your point, it’s not enough. And so what are the pathways to encourage online-to-in-person relationship building? Which, when we layer on the class angle, is much more difficult because people say they don’t have the time or money. And if you’re spread across the country, I don’t know how you’re doing that translation. So what that then leads you to — particularly with the class angle — is a fallback into in-person connection and contribution, being part of something bigger than yourself in the real world. By the way, this is what the majority of the guys we talked to want.

Soren: Would you say that was the thing that was most surprising for you? Especially having done this study with Dan Cox a few years ago — you had a lot of assumptions about how this would go and what you would hear. What stood out to you?

Sam: So I’ll say two things. There’s a hopeful standout, and then a pretty despairing one. The bright spot, to me, is family. The role that family played in these guys’ lives, and the degree to which these guys, for the most part, were glowing in how they thought about fatherhood. Particularly, the purpose that came through fatherhood, or through being uncles — being there in their nephews’ and nieces’ lives. The purpose that came from that, and the real reciprocal and mutual sense of needing and feeling needed by family — that was beautiful. And what gives me hope in that is, frankly, my belief that family is one of the foundational pillars of civil society and associational life. And what that tells me is that this core pillar — as religious participation, community participation, unions, and neighborhood membership have all declined — is still there for a lot of people. And that’s a foundation from which we can build.

The despairing piece for me was the shadow of addiction, the shadow of deaths of despair, the shadow of loss. It wasn’t the majority of the men we talked to, but there was a significant enough subset of guys who lost multiple best friends to suicide or drug overdoses, who lost friends to prison, who lost friends to murder. And those guys were feeling a real, grounded sense of hurt and pain. It seemed that they’d been hurt so much that the openness or willingness to make themselves vulnerable, to build new friendships, just didn’t make sense. We talked to this guy, Douglas, who had incredibly tragic losses in his life — his two closest friends. And he spoke beautifully around the potential of friendship as something akin to blood and family. He basically said, “I’ve just been hurt too bad. I don’t know if it’s worth getting hurt that way again.” His story was maybe more intense than others, but we heard that time and again. Maybe it wasn’t loss from death, tragic death, but it was from betrayal, from getting used, from getting let down. And the guys who felt like they got burned don’t want to get burned again. And that, to me, is pretty despairing.

It reminded me a lot of what I saw in terms of the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve both seen what happens in the wreckage of policy decisions that were made 20 years ago, and how future generations have to deal with that wreckage. And I saw that in these conversations, particularly around the opioid epidemic and deaths of despair.

Soren: Yeah, totally agree.

Sam: Let me ask you that question. There’s a whole interesting thread for us, which is we both have a connection to the military and veteran experience — you obviously serving in the military, me pretending like I served in the military (but, actually, building a veterans nonprofit and leading that for seven years). Did you see any parallels in the research and the interviews between your experiences either in the military or now with friends who are veterans, and the guys that we talked to?

Soren: Yeah, I saw a lot of similarities there. When you make decisions that affect 300 to 400 million people, you have wild reverberations that last a very, very long time and have externalities that you just don’t expect. A lot of veterans, I think, feel their pain comes from this feeling of alienation. And even if they do have a robust relational life, even if they aren’t physically or emotionally alienated from the people immediately around them, they feel very alienated from society. They feel very different. They feel like nobody really understands their pain. And that ends up becoming a source of great strife, I think, for a lot of veterans. Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe — which I know you’ve read too — talks about this deeply, through his own battle with PTSD. But it’s this feeling of alienation from the society around you that just doesn’t understand what you went through, and then you end up feeling very alone and forgotten.

That feeling came across a lot with these guys. They were going through these issues that they knew were not unique, necessarily. They knew they weren’t the only guys who felt this way in the world, but they felt very forgotten, and they felt very alienated and left alone from the people around them. But I left this out of what I was surprised about before. I expected them to go back and blame those structural issues and those policy failures, whatever it might be, and they just did not. They refused to, even when they absolutely should have brought up how they were failed, or how there were forces working against them. When you’re working 80 hours a week and you can barely afford rent, obviously there are structural issues affecting your life, but it just didn’t come up hardly at all.

Sam: So, we’re now going to speculation here, but that, for me, is different than the veteran community. Because the veteran community has this feeling that society — and I’m speaking in generalities — owes a burden or responsibility of care to them. Obviously, that’s manifested through the VA as an example. But when veterans face issues, oftentimes they blame the government and the VA for those issues, at times when it’s not even the VA or the government’s fault. And so I’m curious how you think about the distinctions there. These guys, in our perspective, should be placing the blame on structures, on systems, and aren’t. What’s your hunch on what to attribute that to?

Soren: Yeah, I think one of the weird experiences of serving and then coming home is you get thanked endlessly at the halftime of every NFL game and all these commercials and politicians and this and that. I’m being a little facetious here. Obviously, a lot of the thanks is very sincere and genuine, and I took a lot of very long flights and owe a lot to random grandmas at USOs across the country that baked some cookies that morning and left them out. So there’s a lot to be very thankful for. But you are thanked endlessly by society. And so there’s this discrepancy in a lot of veterans’ minds between that public appreciation and the material help they actually receive when they get home. And so they feel owed something they’re not getting.

Then when you talk to these guys, they don’t feel like they’re owed anything. No one has thanked them for anything. They don’t feel like they’ve done anything that deserves that type of help, which in many cases was just, frankly, not true. But they feel like they are in a very thankless role in society. And so because of that, why do they deserve help? The structures shouldn’t be built for them. And so it’s all up to them to fix the problem. But working-class America is obviously the backbone of everything, so they’re doing quite a lot that deserves our thanks.

Sam: We didn’t write about this explicitly in the report, but the thing that I’ve been circling around is the role that therapy culture has played in all this. A lot of these guys were in therapy or had been in therapy, which is surprising — not even for class reasons, but because therapy is so often described as inaccessible. And my perspective is it seems like some people have been in bad therapy. It feels like the guys we interviewed have bought into this idea that they need to fix themselves in order to be in relationship with other people. And that is just so wildly disconnected from how relationships actually work. You build your confidence and self-esteem in relationships, not apart from them. You build your relational skills in the container of community and relationships, not apart from them. But there was this idea that, “I’m going to self-help fix myself, and then I’ll be ready to return to community.” That felt like a quite pernicious turn. These guys felt like there was something they could be better at, and then at that point they would be ready and worthy to be in relationship with other human beings.

Soren: Yeah, that’s a really interesting thread to pull on. And this is actually where I expected more of the digital media diet to play in. I have watched a lot of this stuff for my previous work, and a lot of it is just telling guys that to be a successful man, you need to make a bunch of money and sleep with a bunch of women and be powerful in some sort of way. And if you don’t have all three of those things, then you failed in some sort of way spiritually as a man. So they feel like, “Well, I might not be any of those things. I need to fix myself before I am worth anything to society,” which is just not the case at all. And then maybe some of them go to therapy to try to figure out a way to reach those points. And one, you’re just going in the wrong direction. That is not the stuff to work on. But two, as you said, I agree — you can’t fix yourself alone. You need a bunch of people to help you do that. That’s the whole point of relationships — to have that sort of social mutual aid between people.

But I will say, a lot of the guys were in therapy and talked really encouragingly about it. They said it was very helpful to them, which was good. Especially if you think about the idea of being sold this bad bill of masculinity when they were younger, about not talking about their feelings and just shoving it all down inside, and this weird, perverse stoicism that has kind of swept the nation. Therapy has been a way for them to move past that and get more in touch with their emotions, which is great. But it’s not everything.

Sam: Yeah. I think that’s a good correction. It felt like it should be one of a multitude of things. So much of the emotional openness we were speaking to, and the rejection of the hyper-masculine, stoic approach, emerged through guys who had been through therapy and were processing things they were letting go of. For the most part, that was good. The problem was that it was the only thing, and that was what stood between them and being involved in other things. And I think both of those things could be true at the same time.

I kind of want to switch gears here, if it’s cool. I know we’re coming to the end. We’ve been talking about some heavy stuff. There was a lot of heavy stuff in this. But I also know that, in my experience just talking to dudes, there’s some funny shit that comes up. And I’m curious if there was anything in particular that stands out as a really funny thing that someone said in the interview process.

Soren: Yeah, there were two. One was funny just because of how it reflected on me. The other one was funny just for what they said. There’s one guy, Beto, who had a wife and a newborn daughter. And the way that he talked about them, it was just unbound love for these two people in his life. He loved his wife dearly. He was smitten by this infant child that he just had. He could have gone on for an hour about how much he loved them. And I forgot how it came up, but we were talking about successes or something, and he goes, “Yeah, well, growing up when I was younger, I always wanted a hot goth girlfriend. And if you look at me now, I got it.” And he was so proud of himself for doing it. I was like, “Fuck yeah, brother, live your true self.”

Sam: That would have been the one I chose to

Soren: Then there was another one where I was talking to a guy, and up front I asked, “What do you do? What are your hobbies?” I play chess now; that’s my main hobby. And I said, “What are your hobbies?” And he said that he fixes old chainsaws, which was an incredibly masculine hobby, and emasculated me immediately at the top of the interview, and I found it hard to come back from.

Sam: He just goes: “Chainsaws.” Yeah, that was really fun to read. The only other thing I’ll say is there was an exchange in one of our later interviews with Hector. You asked him about who his role model was, and he just, without a hesitation, said “Boromir.” I know you’re a big Lord of the Rings guy, so you guys just had this great completely-unrelated-to-the-interview-process riff on how Boromir is misunderstood. And I just thought that was heartwarming to read, but it was also just a pretty funny few pages of interview transcripts all about Boromir.

Soren: That one really took a turn, and I do feel very strongly about that. He’s a great man. He was served a bad bill. He’s a great icon of masculinity as somebody who failed but then made up for it and admitted his failures and went out a hero.

Sam: Well, now that people have heard about why they should reconsider Boromir’s role in the trilogy, what I wanted to end with is where you and I started. There are many areas of overlap that we have, but one of them, I think, is a shared disillusionment with purely quantitative ways of knowing. I know you and I have been trying to push this book, We Built Reality, by Jason Blakely. We read it, share it with everyone, and no one else reads it. But we love it. So I think the question I want to get us towards ending with is: what’s at the heart of this disillusionment for you? I’m curious how this experience with this project shaped your perspective around that, if at all.

Soren: Yeah, I do feel very strongly about that, and you should read that book if you’re listening. Before all this, years ago, I was an interrogator in the Army for Special Operations. But there’s a big struggle in the intel world, not just ours but broadly, about this idea of, “Oh well, everything’s online and digital now, so that’s the way you can collect all this intelligence.” And the fight between quantitative and qualitative actually started there for me, about 15 years ago. Sure, you can hear somebody’s day-to-day conversations if you want, but you only learn so much from just hearing them talk. There is no substitution for speaking to them and asking questions. And you learn there’s this depth of knowledge and information and texture and color that you get from a long one-on-one conversation with somebody that you just cannot get through surveys or polling. It just doesn’t come across. Now, those things serve a purpose. They’re a very fast and relatively cheap way to get that information, but they don’t bring you everything. And when you’re trying to study really thick, thorny, hard-to-wrangle social questions like this, or in politics especially, surveys are just very shallow. The world has changed so much over the last 20 years, and to think that we’d be able to answer really profound questions about what people are thinking, what’s in their mind, how they feel, through impersonal surveys — it’s just not there. We’ve really committed to worshipping at the shrine of the linear regression as this crystal ball that will tell us what’s going on, but it only does so much. And I think we should really look at returning to some older ways of getting this information.

Sam: I think what we said at the outset is that the experience of isolation and disconnection can make you functionally invisible to the outside world. Because your relationships are what make you visible — you are seen by another human being — what we wanted to do was make the invisible visible. And we wanted to take guys who were often talked about but weren’t often heard from directly, and hear from them to humanize their lives, provide texture to their lives, and do so in a way that got into the complexity, the messiness, the confusion of it all. This project emerged from that 2024 survey report that I thought was useful information: It was able to show in pretty clear detail what this class divide looked like overall. But then to be able to go and get into the thorny messiness of it with people, with these guys who were again willing to share some of the most intimate details of their lives — I just feel a sense of responsibility to hold these stories and make sure that they are stewarded as effectively as they can be. I also feel a great sense of richness and of understanding that we’ve even hit on throughout this conversation. What the experience of men without degrees, and the threads of that experience that were consistent look like. We would not have been able to get into it had we relied on just top-line survey questions.

Soren: One of the best examples of this was the gap between the amount of guys who said that they had close friends versus the amount that said they had them once we started doing the interviews. The definition of close friends, when you’re answering a survey, might be there in a single line, or might not be there at all. There’s a ton of qualification that they need to provide for that answer. And then when they get in front of somebody who defines what a close friend is and digs in, it came out that for a lot of the guys that were in that data set who answered “yes” on the survey to having multiple close friends, when I talked to them, it was one, maybe two, people that they had met online, that they had never met in person, and talked to about once a month. I believe that friendship meant a lot to that person, but I would not consider that a close friend. And that’s very hard to come across in a survey, and you would never have learned that without going and talking to those folks. So it’s a “yes, and” to use your line.

Sam: Well. Soren, this project started based on a close friendship, and at the tail end of it, it hasn’t yet wrecked a close friendship. And I’m grateful to do this with you.

Soren: Yeah, me as well. It’s been a really interesting journey.

Left Alone

This project emerged from a close friendship. Soren served for nine years in human intelligence collection roles for U.S. Special Operations. Sam founded and led the Armed Services Arts Partnership, where he spent seven years helping veterans and their families reconnect with a sense of camaraderie and purpose in civilian life. We met during a period of transition for us both, connecting around a shared commitment to making inappropriate jokes, and a shared disillusionment with the shallow public discourse around class, gender, and community. In the years since, Soren began building new strategies for large-scale digital strategic communications, and Sam began researching and writing on the intersection of civic life, social connection, and class.

In 2024, Sam teamed up with the Survey Center on American Life to design and publish the “Disconnected” survey report, which showed the extent to which the college degree has become the dividing line in American civic life. We found that, compared to college grads, Americans without degrees are significantly less likely to participate in religious and community groups, and they have far fewer close friends and people to turn to for social support. What we didn’t find was evidence of the so-called “male loneliness” crisis; education was the dividing line in Americans’ relational lives, not gender.

But there was still an education and gender story hidden in the data. For the past several decades, even as overall college completion rates have increased for women and men, women have been enrolling in and completing college at significantly higher rates than men. Men today make up just over 40 percent of those who enroll in and complete four-year colleges, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1970. More Americans, especially more women, are graduating from four-year colleges, but a growing proportion of the Americans who aren’t graduating are men. So as the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life, men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.

This education and gender story did show up in the qualitative interviews we conducted as part of that same “Disconnected” project. Of the 20 survey respondents we spoke to — women and men, with degrees and without degrees — it was the three men without degrees we interviewed who stood out for being completely untethered. The experiences of isolation these men shared were vulnerable, raw, and, at times, heartbreaking. But their textured, human stories were hidden behind sterile data points that ultimately became fodder for op-eds in major outlets and hot takes on Twitter.

Sam and Soren shared their disillusionment over months of group texts. As we saw it, there was no “male loneliness” crisis, but a crisis of men without degrees being “left alone” by society. The struggles of these men were being instrumentalized for clicks and engagement, and the richness and particularity of their stories were being flattened into lifeless and abstract data points. People were misunderstanding the data, and the data was leading to misunderstanding.

Nobody to Call

The nature of disconnection is that your life — with all its messy experiences and stories, all its emotions and feelings, all its struggles and aspirations — is mostly invisible to the outside world. We decided to embark on this research project, Nobody to Call, to make the invisible visible: to humanize and provide texture to the lives of a group of people who are often talked about but are rarely heard from directly.

Our approach for doing this was simple: talk to guys about their relationships. We conducted one-on-one virtual interviews with 30 American men, all of whom ranged in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties, and none of whom had college degrees. Our interviews lasted 30 to 45 minutes, and during each interview, we asked the same questions about friendship, community, role models, and purpose. While we make no claims about generalizability, we believe the men we interviewed are largely representative of men without degrees in their age range. What follows is the prevailing storyline we heard across our interviews.

Most of the men are almost completely disconnected. Many have no close friends, no connection to the community, and no mentors or role models. It’s not just one thing that’s missing for living a flourishing, connected life; it’s often almost everything: friends, mentors, neighbors, community, and weak ties. As Josiah, a 40-year-old from South Carolina, succinctly shared: “Except for my family, I don’t regularly do anything with anybody.”

The disconnection experienced by many of these men emerged over time through a process of slow drifting away. This slow “drift” often started when they graduated high school, and continued throughout adulthood. For many, the loss of the consistent structure of school — coupled with the lack of a new structure like college, the military, or stable work — contributed to the atrophying of their relationships over time. Silvio, a 28-year-old from Washington, pointedly described the friendship cliff he experienced after graduating high school:

“When I was in high school, I had friends that I would see on a regular basis. I had classes with them, I’d see them at lunch … You keep these people at a distance for a reason, because you know you may never see them again after senior year and you graduate. And that’s true for probably 99% of them. I don’t know where they’ve gone off to, and I don’t necessarily care one way or the other … I might have made close friends if I’d gone off some place else, but I haven’t left where I am. I’m still here...”

Even where connections do exist, they are often tenuous ties — one friend, one mentor, one group — which creates a single point of failure for their relational lives. For these men, new relationships are hard to make, existing ones are easy to break, and common life changes, like a move or a new job, often make the difference between living somewhat connected lives or living in isolation. Jordan, a 43-year-old from Tennessee, reflected on how one friend moving left him friendless and alone:

“We lost touch, and we weren’t hanging out. Then he moved to Seattle, and with the time difference, it became a lot more difficult to hang out — even just talking on the phone. It’s not like we could just say, ‘Hey, let’s go see a movie or let’s do something this weekend.’ They’re in Seattle, I’m in Tennessee, so you just lose touch. I don’t think I’ve talked to him in probably a year and a half … I feel lonely. I feel like I don’t have connections, and on a broader scope … I don’t have anybody that I feel like I matter to.”

But most of these men haven’t closed up or given up. They’re yearning for connection and they’re yearning to contribute to something bigger than themselves. Most men actively want to make more friends, to get more involved in their communities, and to experience more purpose in life. Notably, they see this purpose as something that can only be realized relationally — as fathers, uncles, mentors, and community members. As Cedric, a 31-year-old single father from Texas, put it:

“I think my purpose is not only to give back to my own kids, but to youth in general … That’s how I look at all of that stuff [I went through] — so that I would be able to turn around and do the same for somebody else, and hopefully, save them the way the YMCA saved me … for people that their father wasn’t in the home, they need a positive role model — somebody to look up to.”

Still, the gap between the men’s expressed desire for connection and their ability to fulfill this desire often seemed too big to bridge. Most of these men struggle to identify where to begin to connect with friends and community, and they often confront material barriers (e.g., money, time) to building and sustaining relationships. Yet, they often blame themselves for having neither the confidence nor the skills to be more connected, and they feel it’s their responsibility to “fix” themselves before building new relationships. Deion, a 29-year-old from Ohio, exemplifies the social stuckness that so many of the men we interviewed feel:

“Part of it is social anxiety … I just don’t know how to interact properly … I hate to admit it, but I’ve always been kind of shy and to myself … Now that I’m getting older, connection is a big thing, so I’ve been trying to do that more. But again, I suck at it. I’ve been going to therapy, trying to figure it out, trying to put myself out there more — little by little — so I can gain certain skills. Because I think it’s very important — connection and community. So I be trying to work on that, with a little progress, but not much.”

Calling In

We spent a lot of time debating whether we should close our report on a hopeful note. Ultimately, we landed on no.

For most of the men we interviewed, the gap between their yearning for connection and their capabilities to realize it seemed too big to bridge. That’s because most of these men weren’t just lacking one relationship — be it with a friend, a mentor, a neighbor, a community group, or a house of worship — they were often lacking almost every relationship. Ten to twenty years after leaving high school, most of the men we spoke to found themselves either completely disconnected, or one tenuous tie away from complete disconnection.

We, as a society, have let these men down.

We’ve built a meritocratic system of higher education that has made the four-year degree the cost of entry to living a good life in community. We’ve built a financialized economic system that has undermined the very foundations of working-class life. We’ve built a culture that prizes a form of hyperindividualistic, consumerized choice at the expense of the commitments, communities, and connections that have historically bound us together. There can be no silver bullet or quick fix for this interlocking and compounding process of social disintegration that has been several generations in the making.

The dark irony is that most of these men saw it as their personal responsibility to rebuild their relational lives from scratch. But relationship-formation doesn’t work this way, and never has. Historically, relationships and community have been more the gifts of generational inheritance than the prizes of entrepreneurship. We inherit many overlapping webs of association, which, sustained by tradition, obligation, and necessity, follow us throughout our lives. The relationships we form through these shared associations — family, religion, community, place, or otherwise — beget new relationships and new associations. Contrary to the self-help ethos that pervades our society, relationships and community have never been solely individual choices to make nor individual responsibilities to develop.

But just as we, as a society, have let these men down, we also have an opportunity to lift these men up.

Policy can and should play a role here. We need programs like state service years and cohort-based vocational training to create accessible, structured pathways for relationship-building during the adult transition. We need policies like fair workweeks, living wages, worker boards, paid family leave, and an expanded child tax credit to strengthen the material foundations of working-class life. Policies like these are important, but policy alone is not enough.

If the challenges these men face are relational, our collective action must begin relationally. Families, the one form of connection most of these men still have, can see it as their responsibility to get their isolated sons, brothers, fathers, and uncles more connected with friends and community. Religious and community groups should support the efforts of these families so they’re not shouldering this responsibility on their own. And these same groups should make dedicated efforts to intentionally invite disconnected men to participate and belong — just as the YMCA did 175 years ago.

The good news from our interviews is that many men without degrees will be receptive to this kind of outreach. The current cultural narrative about these men — that they are nihilistic, resentful, closed-up loners — is almost entirely wrong. Most of these guys want to open up, connect, and contribute, but they need to be called in. As Deion shared:

“I’m just trying to figure out something I want to do in my life that’s gonna change the world — or the community — in a positive light. Now I’m just looking for purpose, something bigger than me, something where I can make the change in someone’s life or my life. I’m just here, just passing by — and that doesn’t sit well with me.”

Will we answer the call, or continue to leave them alone?

Subscribe now

*Note: The illustrations used throughout this project were hand-drawn by EJ Baker. They are not literal portraits of the men we spoke to, but rather represent them in age and ethnicity. This approach allowed us to further humanize these men without compromising their anonymity.

Read more

Read more

I’ve known and looked up to Phil since I was a schmucky 23-year-old getting the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP) off the ground, and he was a recent National Book Award-winner who would make the time to get coffee with me when I visited New York City. It was Phil’s writing (and ’s) that helped me make sense of the complicated, profoundly moral experience of leading ASAP, and the significant distance between the military and the American public that often shields civilians from confronting war’s moral consequences.

So, when the war in Iran started, I knew I wanted to have a conversation for Connective Tissue — not about the war itself, but about the distance between the military and the American public that has enabled our 21st century conflicts, and about war’s profound moral and human consequences. Phil was the person I wanted to have this conversation with, and I was grateful that he agreed to speak with me and our mutual friend (and resident philosopher), Ian Marcus Corbin.

Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be an exceptional, powerful, and challenging discussion. I hope you consider giving it a full read. And, if this is the first time you’re encountering Phil’s work and want to go deeper, I encourage you to read Redeployment, Missionaries, Uncertain Ground, and his recent public writing. Semper tissue.

- Sam

Share

Sam: I was trying to figure out where to start this, and I ended up going back to the “Citizen-Soldier” piece that you first published for Brookings in 2016. You wrote, “Joining the military is an act of faith in one’s country—an act of faith that the country will use your life well.” I remember loving that line when I read it in 2016, and when I read it again, it felt like it captured a lot of the commitments that underpin your writing: service and citizenship, obligation and responsibility, faith and morality. But I’m curious to hear, in your own words, how you would describe the experiences and influences that have formed you and that animate your work.

I retain an idealistic patriotism. It’s difficult to say that line without it being tinged by a certain amount of grief because the country has not used the lives of its service members well. And this is not just about what happens to the service members, but the global consequences of the irresponsible use of military force.

I joined the military as a young man, in some ways convinced by the humanitarian argument for Iraq. Here is this brutal dictator who has no just authority over his own country. Therefore, what is the worst that can happen if we invade? Iraq is not headed on a good trajectory. It is a source of instability in the region. And the continuance of Saddam’s regime means only more suffering for the Iraqi people. Since the status quo was so bad, if we rolled the iron dice of war, I thought the chances of the situation ending up much better were pretty good.

And then, God, in December 2019, I’m in Sinjar speaking with a woman. Her family was murdered in the Yazidi genocide. Then she was captured and taken as a slave by ISIS. She was ultimately rescued, but her sister was still in the Al-Hol refugee camp — still in captivity. And the guy who was running this Yazidi smuggling operation is asking us, “Why can’t we get any attention? We still have so many people who are trapped.”

How bad can it get? The issue with war is there is really no bottom to how bad it can get. There’s people I know who were sent to failed wars — and Afghanistan is the most stark example of that. Then there are broader consequences for the regions where we’re engaged in combat and where we have expended military power without a thought.

So there’s this idealistic notion I have about service that I still hold to dearly, and then there’s the more difficult question of whether America has proven itself worthy of that faith. Would I tell a parent whose child is signing up for the military today that the current administration will only engage in military operations if they have seriously thought through all the consequences, and that there will be a robust congressional oversight that will ensure that our war plans are moral and achievable? No. Neither of those things apply, and that’s a tragic situation to be in.

Ian: You opened by saying you retain some sort of patriotism. There’s loving the people around you — maybe there’s loving or thinking highly of your fellow service members. But what does it mean to be patriotic in this moment? It can’t just be loving the aggregate of people around you, can it? Doesn’t there also have to be some guiding conception of what the country could be?

That is the question. I always come back to Lincoln’s notion of a nation that is conceived with the idea that men are born free and dedicated to equality. The imperfectness of that is obviously baked in from the beginning, but it’s a desire to have a robust, pluralistic nation that holds those core principles at its heart. I don’t think that the current state of affairs, at any point in history, is a reason to turn one’s back on that project. The most difficult periods of American history are precisely those moments when it is more important that we dedicate ourselves to those propositions.

In a weird way, what you have with the current administration is a repudiation of the principles of America precisely because they failed. This is when you have JD Vance talking about how people don’t fight for abstractions. Obviously people do fight for abstractions. But for him, in the wake of the failures of wars started with high rhetoric about democracy, the response to that is to retreat to a narrow nationalism rooted in soil and land and people. I am not unmoved by the invocation of a concrete attachment to your community that Vance talks about when he talks about the graveyard where generations of his family are buried. But I’m also a New Yorker, so when people talk about their attachment to a community, the thing that is the traditional New York is not a static place, but one marked by immigration and change.

There’s a conception of American identity that is baked in from the beginning, which is all about turbulence and mixing and pluralism and change. One of the things that anchors that is a set of abstractions and idealistic commitments. This stripped down notion that “American idealism didn’t work out very well, so let’s chuck it to the side and be hard-headedly realist” — that gives up a core traditional conception of what it is to be an American in the first place.

Ian: There’s a way to do multiculturalism that a lot of European countries are deciding right now has not worked. This is where, in the suburbs of London, you have neighborhoods where everyone speaks a language other than English. I think they’re deciding that what has come of that form of Englishness is social dislocation, culture war, and the body politic not being anything in particular, but just being a collection of very different things. Does it work differently in America? Is there something about the New York City model that isn’t just like, “Oh, look, there are the Algerians, there are the Vietnamese,” but that somehow brings a unitedness?

This is our tradition. There’s a famous quote in “Letters from an American Farmer” from John de Crèvecœur in 1782:

What then is the American, this new man? He’s either a European, or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a man, a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he’s embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great alma mater.

Already in the 18th century, the defining feature of Americanness is a certain degree of mixture defined by immigrants. Then there’s the question of “What all ties that together?” There are a variety of things. Some that conservatives talk about — community and history and tradition — I’m very attached to. But the founding principles become and remain a really important glue.

Sam: One of JD Vance’s other core justifications for being “more of an American” is the fact that his ancestors — and communities like the one he came from — are the ones that have borne more of the brunt of the wars that have been fought. And I do read your writing over the past 15 years as calling attention to this very distance between the people who fight our wars and the rest of us. So what do you see as the primary causes of this distance between the military and American civilians? How have they accelerated over time?

There’s always been a kind of distance between the American public and the people who fight the wars because war is such an extreme and intense experience. This is as old as war literature: Odysseus coming back to Ithaca and only being recognized by his dog. It’s a foundational experience that sometimes causes people to re-evaluate themselves and their relationship to the polity that sent them abroad. There’s an aspect that is natural and not really possible to do away with.

But something does feel distinct in this current era. Partly that’s to do with the fact that we’re fighting with an All-Volunteer Force, so you have this distance that arises simply because the only people who are going into wars are people who signed up to go in the first place. It’s a relatively small portion of the population, too. It’s not like Vietnam, where there’s a draft, or World War Two, where there’s a draft and the whole nation feels mobilized. Instead, it’s very possible to tune the wars out.

Sam: The end of conscription and the creation of a professionalized, all-volunteer military always struck me as the biggest driver of this distance.

Yes, but there have also been a series of political decisions that have dovetailed with technological advances.

When we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress voted on that decision, and created an authorization for the use of military force. Eventually, the American public started to really sour on the wars overseas, and Obama got elected, in part, on his opposition to the Iraq War. He pulls troops out of Iraq in 2011, but then you have this increasing violence in Iraq and the rise of ISIS. So, a schizophrenic mood starts to develop among the American public: When they see a group like ISIS rising, they want it defeated, but they also don’t want to be at war forever.

That’s when the Obama Administration starts ramping up military aid, and they start sending a lot of special operations troops overseas. All the while, however, they’re arguing that this is not a re-entry into the war because they “ended” the war with fanfare. They’re giving press conferences where they say they’re not putting boots on the ground, they’re just putting in “advisors” in a supervise, train, and assist role. But then, a Pentagon press person is awkwardly dancing around the fact that we’re sending troops to war by admitting well yes, they might end up in “combat situations.”

The politicians are asking us to not consider it a war, and Congress is allowing this to happen without any awkward votes — and part of the reason it’s possible is because we have tools at our disposal that don’t require large troop deployments like we had in 2007, when I was there. We’re using drones. We’re using airstrikes. We’re using special operations troops or special forces as well. These are elite soldiers who are more separate from the American body politic. This is not the 18-year-old kid who signs up for a couple years and then goes to college. A lot of them tend to be older — they tend to be career guys. One told a buddy of mine, Jacob Siegel, that their job was to be like the French Foreign Legion, where nobody back home cares so much if they die. As he writes, “Their purpose is to be no one’s sons or daughters.” So you have the tools of American warfare being used in a way that is designed not to attract much attention, and the administration is actively telling the American public not to pay that much attention to it. We use lethal force, but it feels like a small commitment — one that need not be a matter of American domestic politics.

We’ve been here before, though. In 1962, David Halberstam was embedded with special forces in Vietnam — well before Vietnam becomes Vietnam. He’s writing about how the soldiers in this conflict conceptualize their mission: “With engagement in a private war comes a certain sense of isolation, a feeling that while it is their war, it is not really their country’s war. They find their fellow Americans ignorant of what is going on here — worse, perhaps, indifferent — and it continues to disturb them that no one seems to know where Vietnam is.” And then he writes, “It will almost certainly never reach the harsh sense of alienation that came to haunt the French army and the French people during the time of their struggles with Indo-China’s insurgent populace.”

Because, well, it’s just a little engagement, mostly done with special forces, and yeah, it’s weird, but maybe this is just part of being a professional military? But small private wars have a way of becoming big public wars.

Sam: Can you say more on what you see as the human, relational, and communal consequences of this distance?

You sign up for whatever reason you sign up, but, ultimately, you’re representing the country. In a democracy, there should be a feeling of direct linkage between the will of the American people and what you’re doing, engaging in warfare, which is the most morally consequential thing that a democracy can do. So, to come back from a theater of war — where you have possibly lost friends and put your body at risk and been exposed to horrific things — and to find not even hostility to what you’ve been doing, but indifference and ignorance of it, that feels like a particular kind of betrayal. It’s a severing of the contract between the citizen and the soldier. If joining the military is an act of faith that the country will use your life well, it’s deeply disturbing to then find that they didn’t think much of anything at all about how they were using your life, and that you ended up in what Halberstam calls a “private war.”

Sam: If war is the most morally consequential thing a democracy can do, what do you see as the moral obligations of civilians (and their elected leaders) to the military and veterans, both living and dead?

There’s an immediate need to restructure how we approach war so that it returns to more democratic control. We’re in a very dangerous situation right now. After the Venezuela raid, I wrote a piece where I basically said, “As long as we have an unrestrained Executive in this way, presidents are just going to keep rolling the dice until we end up in something that’s an unmistakable disaster, rather than merely something that might have negative consequences over the course of years.” Returning to a system in which there’s much more public debate and restraint around warfare is important for tightening that connection between the will of the populace and the things that we ask Soldiers and Marines to do.

That’s not simply a moral question, it’s also a strategic question. One of the first things Sun Tzu talks about is the “moral law”: If you’re going to go to war, make sure the population is behind you. You articulate a strong moral and practical case for war because you need to marshal the population to be ready to apply the kind of resources necessary to achieve a just outcome.

Then there’s the question of, “How do you respond to the Soldier?” I don’t think you can do much better than Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: caring for the widow and the orphan and the wounded — “those who borne the battle.” As for what we owe the dead, I don’t think you can do much better than The Gettysburg Address. It’s not simply about honoring the dead, but being committed to the moral principle for which they give their lives.

Ian: As war has become more distant — as it’s become less and less likely that people in power will see their own children go off to war — I feel like the language has changed. There’s this strange invocation, which I always find creepy, of, “Do you support the troops?” And everyone scrambles and flaps their arms to say how much they support the troops. It’s not like people are calling service members “Our boys,” like they did in World War Two. What do you think about the symbolic role that the troops play for us in light of this distance between the military and the American public?

There was this mini-controversy recently. Donald Trump showed up at a dignified transfer, and he was wearing a ball cap right as the bodies of these service members who had fallen in the war that he started are being transferred. That is disrespectful. Then they put out a fundraising email with an image of him at the dignified transfer, and it was like, “You donate this much and you get national security briefings,” or something along those lines.

There’s a reality of what those events are supposed to signify. There’s a weight to a dignified transfer, which is particular and devastating if you know the people. Then there’s the imagery around it as a patriotic pastiche: it’s a visual signifier of patriotism, free-floating from genuine concern about a particular individual in a particular family who died for the nation.

There’s a fairly obvious thing: Don’t fundraise off the corpses of Soldiers. But something that seems so fundamental and basic is just not operative. It’s almost like these symbols of American patriotism have gotten detached from anything resembling what those symbols are supposed to connect to, and they just exist as signifiers of greatness and power. It’s a particularly disturbing and degraded shift in our politics.

Sam: To close, I think it’s worth coming back to that line from earlier: “It’s the special forces’ purpose to be no one’s sons or daughters.” Because when I think about this thread of creating solidarity between civilians and their military, there are few things more antithetical to that notion than saying, basically, the only people who are “boots on the ground” are people who are, for lack of better words, “orphans.” That’s a feature and not a bug of our current situation: There’s a deeper kernel of truth in that line that’s been hovering over this entire conversation.

Part of the complication is, in theory, you sign up in a way such that the average American doesn’t have to deal with war. Put it this way: You don’t want to live in a society where there’s no gap between the service member and the society because that is a society engulfed by total war. The whole point of joining is, in a weird way, so that there can be that kind of distance. It’s important for service members to value the weight and seriousness of normal quotidian civilian life.

I always think of that quote from John Adams, where he’s like, “I must study politics and war so my sons have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, and their grandchildren can study poetry.” The whole point of all of this is to enable people to do the arts — not because the arts are frivolous, but because you want normal American citizens living rich, full lives. That’s the whole purpose. The value of society does not lie in acts of violence; it lies in people in peace, pursuing lives of beauty and meaning. That must sometimes be secured by war, but once the war aims are achieved, it must be secured by thoughtful political engagement.

The way that we wage war and conduct our politics are currently off, and that certainly feels like a betrayal to the Soldier. But the end state is not a happy Soldier. The end state is a healthy society, where your grandchildren have a right to study, painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain — none of which will be done by AI.

Subscribe now

Read more

I can say a lot more about the conversation — it was wonderful, fun, joyful, bizarre, intense, and intimidating all at the same time. But, for now, I mostly want to express my gratitude to Esther and her team for so graciously inviting me into a dialogue about the many paradoxes of our relational lives. - Sam

Richard Young is the Founder and Executive Director of CivicLex, a Lexington, KY based nonprofit that helps the community get involved in local issues, connect with their neighbors, and have a say in decision making. I’ve come to view Richard as a bit of a unicorn: He’s rooted and committed to the place he’s always called home, and he’s a national voice on civic health, local news, and democracy.

Richard and I first met in 2024, and over the past year and a half, we’ve been collaborating to bring together a network of place-based practitioners to imagine new possibilities for our generational project of civic renewal. The result of that work was the open letter we published last week, along with the party we’re hosting in Denver in April. So, it felt like as good a time as ever to sit down with Richard for a Q&A.

And we actually did sit down together at Kentucky Native, a nursery and cafe in Lexington, where Richard knew no fewer than half of the people in the space. Our conversation covered a lot of ground. What is it, exactly, that CivicLex does, and if it’s so essential, why aren’t there more CivicLex’s out there? We celebrate proximity, relationality, and accountability, but can you be overly proximate, relational, and accountable? And why publish an open letter with other local practitioners when you all have so much going on locally?

This was one of the most fun Q&As I’ve ever done, and I hope you have fun reading it, too. If you want to learn more about CivicLex, check out their website, newsroom, and local newsletter. And if you haven’t yet read our open letter, consider checking it out and signing on.

- Sam

A lot of people know about you and CivicLex outside of Kentucky, which is interesting considering you’re exclusively focused on one place in Kentucky. But you are often on the road spreading the good word about your work in Lexington and the importance of strengthening local civic life. Every other week I talk to you, you seem to be getting a flight. Why do all that?

When we started CivicLex eight years ago, people didn’t really understand us. I remember in our early days we were part of this grant competition where our pitch basically was: “We’re starting this thing called CivicLex. We want to have this website for people to go to learn about local issues and how they can get involved. But we also are going to do all of these in-person events because your ability to influence anything here is based on who you know — if you don’t have the relational connections, it becomes much harder to effectively engage.” These two things — information and relationships — were intrinsically locked together.

Needless to say, we didn’t get the money because the judges didn’t understand what we were doing. They asked things like, “Why would it be important for people to know these people that work in local government?” Even as CivicLex got bigger and more complicated, we kept running into this issue where we were hard to define for people. People also assumed things like us would already exist. I once had the head of a major foundation say to me: “Every community has five organizations like this.” And I had to say, “No, sir. No it doesn’t.”

Then throughout the past eight years, I keep coming back to the same conversations about scale. I would talk to funders and they’d be like, “You need many of these in different communities for the work to really have impact.” But impact doesn’t necessarily just mean reaching a lot of people. Before this, I did community development work at a neighborhood level. I had a constituency of maybe 3,000 people. That work is recognized as high-impact, even though it doesn’t have “scale.” Why wouldn’t that concept translate over to civic spaces?

I was getting frustrated. No one was getting that multiple types of things are needed to make a civic life work, and that the leadership of that work needs to be coming out of a place and accountable to that place. So, in order to have anywhere near successful conversations with funders, I felt I had to shift the conversation as much as I could about why approaching this work relationally at the local level is important.

So, in retrospect, I guess it was mostly spite. Joyful spite.

What you’re getting at is CivicLex does a lot. For the uninitiated or even the initiated who still don’t understand what you’re doing, how would you begin to describe what you guys do here in Lexington? What are the threads that hold it together?

CivicLex does three things: We help people understand and get involved in local issues in our community, we help connect people with their neighbors, and we help change how decisions get made.

We do a couple different things to help people understand and get involved in local issues. We have a foot in journalism through our newsroom, which covers city meetings and other things in civic life. We do civic education for young people, which involves directly teaching in the public school system. We teach thousands of students a year about how local government works and how to advocate for issues they care about. We bring people from community organizations and local government into the public school system to meet students and help build those relationships early. We also do continuing adult education about local civic life. We teach people Advocacy 101: If you care about something in your neighborhood, how do you go about getting it?

We intentionally stimulate relationship building in our community. We host dozens of in-person events every year. We also support places where people already gather: providing grants for neighborhood block parties and newsletters, and investing in local clubs and their capacity to connect people. But the main way people build relationships is by interacting with each other casually over a long period of time, and the place where people often do that is public spaces. So public spaces have become a big focus of our work: namely, bringing the public into decision making around them, and working to both activate and help design them.

The last part of our work is about changing how decisions get made. If we want people to participate in civic life, we have to construct a civic life that wants their participation. This is the newest part of our work, and it came from experiences where we would tell people to get involved, and then they would participate, have a bad time, and not want to do it again.

I distinctly remember getting chewed out in a grocery store by someone who came to a budget workshop and then showed up to a city meeting where the vote on the city budget happened before public comment. They were like, “I did the thing you told me to do. I showed up here to participate in this process, and they voted on it before my turn to speak. I’m not going to do this again.” That’s when we realized that we needed to start looking at how these structures operate, and look at how we could change them. We’ve done this a number of ways: reimagining public meetings, changing our city’s Boards and Commissions, bringing public voice into land use planning, and soon, hosting a Civic Assembly.

I remember reading a piece last year by John Ganz called “Civic Life Kinda Sucks.” It got a lot of traction because he was speaking to the thing you just mentioned: Going to the meetings often does kinda suck. So what does it actually look like to move people toward a better experience around shaping those decisions so you are not getting reamed out in the grocery store?

You have to be okay with just getting reamed out a little bit less every year for a long period of time. Because it takes convincing local decision makers that it is in their interest to change systems, and that’s hard. Change is difficult and uncomfortable, so you have to demonstrate that there’s a value proposition for the decision maker.

You also have to be okay with it taking forever to change, and with any change you succeed in making can be upended immediately. There have been many times when I felt we were making progress on these reforms or changes to systems. Then something happens that’s fully out of our control — this ice storm that we’re experiencing right now in Lexington, for instance — and it moves people so far backwards on the trust meter with local government. Right now, people are pissed off about the city’s response to the ice storm, and it’s going to take a lot of time to convince people to show back up to a process.

But this type of change is still essential to do. For us, what it looks like is developing long-term relationships with people in government. We try to show them that we’re operating with good intentions, experimenting, and seeing what works. And we try to assume the risk, not put the risk burden on local government.

We’re currently working on a civic assembly, which is the biggest version of this we’ve ever done. Importantly, we’re assuming the risk. We approached the government and were like, “This is what we want to do for this thorny problem. We’ll pay for it. We’ll take on the risk. But you have to be open to joining the journey. We’ll give you all the information about how it works and doesn’t work, and you have to be open to the process, respond to the results, and consider using it in the future.”

It seems like you’re keeping local government at arms distance with the civic assembly pilot. What has it looked like to work more directly with government to shape decisions?

The projects where we’ve worked with the local government in genuine partnership have been the most rich and rewarding. We did this project in 2022 around the city’s comprehensive land use plan. Land use is the most contentious political issue in the city — it’s what decides mayoral elections and council elections — because it is about whether our city expands its urban service boundary into farmland. We have big interests on both sides: development interests that want to build, and rural preservationists that want to preserve horse farms.

The typical process for determining this issue involves some town halls in gyms where people get mad, and then the active interests operating behind the scenes. Instead, we designed a process where anyone anywhere in the city could host a conversation about land use. One week, 509 conversations, and 15,000 public comments later, this process produced a different result.

Importantly, this took a two-year process leading up to this one week of actual engagement. We walked alongside government the entire time. We hand-read all 15,000 public comments, built a code book, and hand-coded them. It took two weeks, eight hours a day, 30 people — all my staff, all the Long Range Planning staff — hand-coding every response.

Government representatives came to probably 150 of the 509 conversations. But that’s what it took for a long-term change, because they were in there hearing from people and seeing how this was different. Then they were hand-coding the results and saying, “Wow, these public opinions are nuanced, complex, and thoughtful. These are things that we could work with.” Tangible changes to our city’s 20-year plan came out of that process because they walked with us the whole time. That’s what it takes: two years, long-term relationships, and long-term accountability. It’s not just a program that can be turned on and turned off.

You’re building a mediating layer between residents and local government, which seems like it would be essential in every place. But if it’s so essential, how do you account for the fact that CivicLex seems to be so unique?

People will say things like, “Oh my god, you stumbled onto this interesting thing.” And I’m always thinking, “This just seems like, ‘duh.’ Of course there should be something that acts as a telephone operator between the government and the public.”

What we are, if anything, is an ombudsman. If you want to get involved, we’ll guide you to the right place. I often talk publicly about these big programs and all the things we do. But the reality is that, every week, we get calls from people looking for housing assistance, and we tell them where to go. We’ll get emails from people saying things like, “I can’t get in touch with my council member. What should I do?”

I think our role reflects a failure on many levels. It’s a failure of government. It’s a failure of a market-based media ecosystem that is solely motivated by eyeballs, clicks, and profit. It’s a failure of our society to let civic life hollow out. Yes, we are a honed, purpose-built program to address this hollowing out. But that has only come in response to what we see as observable gaps in our communities.

Kentucky, itself, strikes me as unique. Yes, almost all of my favorite musicians (Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers) and writers (Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton) have called Kentucky home. But more saliently to this conversation, it seems like a lot of creative experimentation has been happening in Kentucky. What do you attribute this to?

Part of it is culture. Kentucky is a highly relational place, and Lexington is a highly relational place. It’s a place where the distance between neighbors and government, between rural and urban counties, isn’t that big. As I learned through my time with the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange, we all depend on each other. We’re stuck with each other — in a good way. You can’t disengage when things get sticky.

I think people are sometimes surprised by the experimentation happening here because of preconceived notions about our state, many of which are driven by national media. I also think that many find the relational nature of the work in places like ours to be confusing. They see relationships as means, not ends in and of themselves.

But some of my favorite examples of civic work happens in places like Kentucky — I’m thinking about Civic Nebraska, or the David Mathews Center in Alabama. That’s because places like ours tend to be scrappy. CivicLex didn’t break a $100,000 budget for its first four years. When you don’t have a lot of resources, you center other things — relationships, responding to your community. If I were a funder, I’d put my money in these kind of scrappy places where we just make things happen.

It seems like people are now awakening to the importance of strengthening civic life in ways that prioritize place, participation, and relationships. I know you get a lot of people who want to translate elements of CivicLex beyond Lexington. What kind of guidance would you give those people to spread some of that CivicLex sauce to their local communities?

Do multiple things at once, which means don’t go super deep on one thing. If you’re starting a project about providing information to people, how can you work on the relational piece and the systems change piece, too? If you’re doing a systems change project, are you also thinking about how people use information and how they build relationships? If you’re working on the relationship piece, that’s great; but how are you enabling people to also advance the things that they care about?

I’m not saying that everyone has to do everything all the time, but I do think we should ask ourselves, “If I’m encouraging people to get involved in a system, is that system well-equipped to receive them? Am I following it all the way down the path?” If not, what are you going to do to prepare the garden bed?

We’re sitting in a plant shop. Durable ecosystems have multiple species. Monocultures aren’t great. But I often feel that the broader civic and democracy renewal space thinks in terms of monocultures. A lot of our interventions into civic life are, “If we plant this one thing, it will fix the ecosystem.” That’s not how ecosystems work, though. You need many things. You have to be planting a garden, not a crop, when you’re trying to renew your place. You can have a small garden or you can have a really big garden. What’s important is to have multiple species — multiple types of civic work overlapping — not just soybeans.

Let’s say I’m just beginning. Maybe I plant a little civic media newsroom to cover town meetings. But should I also be organizing a little microgrant for neighbors to gather?

It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Maybe just have some coffee hours where people can talk to you. Maybe go talk to your local government and say, “I’ve been noticing these things in the meetings that I’ve been attending. I would love to talk with you about what it looks like to build that better. Would you consider coming to this coffee chat that I’m hosting and talking to the people who are talking to me?” It’s a starting point for engaging in information, relationships, and systems-change all at once.

What you’re pointing to is thinking relationally rather than thinking mechanically.

That’s a much better way of saying everything I just said in the past 10 minutes.

It’s a way of acknowledging that all these things are interrelated, rather than, “This is one input that’s going to be designed to create some sort of measurable output.”

It’s acknowledging that our ecosystem is just made up of people that have emotions and feelings and thoughts and cares and dreams and aspirations and failures that they know and understand. And you should just talk with them. That is a very different thing on the local level compared to the national level. I can’t have a personal relationship with Chuck Schumer. I’m not going to have a personal relationship with Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, my two Senators. But I can have a relationship with the person who is in charge of streets and roads. I can go and talk to him and say, “Hey man, my street’s not been plowed.”

Rand Paul — notably someone who has had tough relationships with his neighbors. This, in a weird way, gets me back to a question I’ve had in the back of my mind. We’ve been circling around three related concepts this whole convo: proximity, relationality, and accountability. They also have come up in many of our past conversations, and when we talk about it, I’m often like, “Hell yeah, brother.”

But when I think about the practical implications, being overly proximate, overly relational, and overly accountable feels like it could be overwhelming. It feels like it could be a reason someone wouldn’t want to do the work anymore. Is there a way that you can have proximity and accountability without it completely burning you out?

It’s beautiful and terrible — all at once. The beauty of it is what we just experienced at Kentucky Native. We came to this place and we saw five people I knew inside an hour. When you have that degree of proximity, it creates an undeniable accountability because you cannot escape critique. You cannot escape feedback, and that’s good (I think).

But it also creates a type of pressure: There is a finite amount of time that one can do this work. I can’t do this forever. I’m tired. But I want CivicLex to continue to exist, so it cannot be about me. I have to be thinking in terms of governance structures, revenue structures, etc. for 10 years from now, not this year. I need to build something the next person can pick up. This is where all the principles in the letter come together. Building for long-term accountability means building something that is generational — that you, personally, are not caring for forever.

There’s an irony in people trying to build democratic innovations that are inherently distant and unaccountable. That’s the whole point. The entire purpose of our way of being is the accountability of the governance structure. If you’re doing work in a community that you’re not accountable to, that’s a form of tyranny. Yes, it’s much less serious than actual tyranny, but it’s the soft tyranny of imposing your will onto a place.

Your answer just now reminded me of how distance can be something that you could hide behind. It also creates an easy exit hatch — whether that be exiting a relationship, exiting a commitment, or exiting a place.

If I mess up my work, I can’t live here anymore. And it’s a place I’m from. My parents live here. If I don’t do my work well, my mom will hear about it. That is a unique type of pressure. But in work that is about improving a place, you can’t stop at having professional accountability. You have to have personal accountability, and distance removes that type of accountability.

You just mentioned the letter we’re releasing: “An Invitation to a New Civic Future.” When this Q&A comes out, we’ll have, knock on wood, already published our open letter. Why release an open letter? Why now?

In community development, one of the things you learn is that doing something is not necessarily better than doing nothing. Sometimes an intervention you think is going to make things better is actually harmful.

Things are in such a sorry state right now that there’s an urgency to try to correct them. But, to me, the value of this letter is to provoke that question: Is the thing that we’re doing better than nothing? For the people trying to “save our democracy,” are the things they’re investing in built for long-term, durable change? Is a solution tried and failed better than doing nothing?

I hope that the letter is a bit of a provocation in a friendly way to say, “There is a version of this that works. We’ve seen it work. It’s rooted in the history of our country and our communities, and it’s aligned with how people function in the real world. It may not be visible to everyone, but this is a solution that we think is worth more than doing nothing.”

The future we’re trying to will into being through the letter is one where people feel agency over their lives, where neighbors are connected through relationships of trust, and where communities have the power to shape their own futures. We think we need guiding principles for our interventions, and we suggest five, all of which are rooted in localism.

If you’re in your community, or in a hall of power, and you genuinely care about people having a sense of agency, this will never be able to be done from the top down. It just can’t. It’s too brittle. There is a more durable way to do this, and what we spell out in the letter is a pathway. I’m hopeful that if we illuminate this path, it will at least make enough people curious to check it out and go down the path a little bit. Who knows? They might find a pretty woodland garden at the end of it.

Subscribe now

Can you feel it?

In the face of our country’s many crises, new seeds of civic renewal are beginning to take root. In neighborhoods, parks, libraries, and houses of worship across America, neighbors are cultivating a new civic future and finding new ways to break out of the dominant idea for the past 50 years: that our communities were better managed from afar than built together in the places we call home.

But our communities know better.

While our political parties and institutions crumble under partisanship and ineffectiveness, communities are solving problems for themselves. While distant experts sell us technocratic fixes to community ills, communities are renewing themselves from within. While national headlines tell us we’re lonely, divided, and powerless, communities are showing us something else: a future rooted in the local, neighbor-led civic life that has sustained this nation since its founding.

America is at the start of a generational opportunity to renew our civic life.

Moments like this are fragile. They can be nurtured. Or, they can be captured. Solutions being sold to communities by distant experts, nonprofits, and funders who aren’t accountable to them may not intend harm. But they often shift attention, power, and resources away from communities, displacing local stewardship rather than strengthening it.

It’s this opportunity for community-led renewal — and the risk it gets captured — that’s brought a small group of us together over the past year. We come from different political traditions, geographies, and lines of work, but we are bound by a shared commitment to renewing civic life in the places we live and by a shared belief that this renewal can only be built from the ground up.

As we’ve met, we’ve asked ourselves: What kind of shared civic life are we called to grow together?

Here’s our answer: One where people feel agency over their lives, where neighbors are connected through relationships of trust, and where communities have the power to shape their own future.

Share

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CIVIC RENEWAL

We believe the seeds of this shared civic life must be rooted in five foundational principles for cultivating our collective future:

Participatory

We must approach residents as active members expected to shape their community’s future, not passive clients to be served.

Too much of civic life treats communities as places to be managed instead of places to belong. Professionals design the programs, boards approve the plans, and residents are left to receive or reject what’s been made for them. People are invited to consume decisions as clients or customers instead of producing their own future.

In our civic future, that story changes. People aren’t passive recipients; they are active members deserving of full participation in our shared lives. In our civic future, communities become the laboratories of democracy: places where neighbors work together to solve problems and make meaning. Nothing is done for communities or to them. It’s done by them.

What does this future look like? Relearning the practices of membership we’ve forgotten: cooperation, shared responsibility, and mutual accountability. Recognizing and supporting the local leaders who already help their communities thrive. Removing the practical barriers — time, transportation, resources — that make participation harder for many people.

Alive

We must embrace the joy, culture, and full humanity that make civic life worth living, not the logic of the machine.

Too much of our civic life has been drained of its humanity, turned into something efficient, procedural, and lifeless. We’re told that it’s serious work that must look serious — that the path to a better community is paved by following best practices in pursuit of quantifiable metrics. Yet our most enduring civic traditions arose because people naturally gather, share meals, laugh, mourn, and celebrate together, not because someone stumbled upon a successful intervention.

In our civic future, joy, creativity, and the human condition are not distractions from civic life — they are its lifeforce! In our civic future, people show up as full, complex human beings and build a civic life that people want to belong to. In our civic future, people actually want to show up — because it’s magnetic, because it’s irresistible.

What does this future look like? It’s one filled with shared meals in kitchens, church basements, and on front porches where people experience laughter and sorrow. Communities gathering at block parties, festivals, and cultural rituals rooted in their histories and traditions. People experiencing a full range of emotions side by side, remembering what it feels like to be fully human.

Proximate

We must root renewal in the people who live in the places they serve, not distant groups and leaders.

Too much of our civic life is built from afar. When civic work is led by those who are neither rooted in nor accountable to the people they serve, people and places become commodified and disposable. Communities and their leaders become abstract anyones and anywheres instead of the storied, rich, and real cultures they are.

In our civic future, renewal is led by people rooted in their particular places. When leaders live in the places they serve, know their neighbors by name, and stay long enough to see the results of their work in the next generation, it brings undeniable accountability. In our civic future, scale isn’t achieved by top-down replication or centralization, but from the bottom-up by millions of rooted leaders cultivating civic life in tens of thousands of particular places.

What does this future look like? People discovering their self-interest, rightly understood, by recognizing their own flourishing is bound up with the flourishing of their neighbors. Distributed networks of local leaders, connected to each other in mutualistic relationship within and across place. Sustainability that doesn’t rely on constant outside funding – where communities have real ownership and can govern themselves.

Relational

We must treat relationships and interpersonal trust as ends in and of themselves, not means toward other ends.

Too much of our civic life has become transactional. We treat relationships as means to other ends: to advance goals, prove outcomes, or get the scale we need for investment. We build fields instead of friendships, host convenings instead of seeking communion. All of this can leave us with an aftertaste of feeling used.

In our civic future, relationships are not a strategy or tactic to advance some “more important” measurable outcome — they are the substance of the work itself. In our civic future, our work is built on a foundation of long-term reciprocity that strengthens both people and places. It is this relational commitment that earns trust that lasts.

What does this future look like? Slowing down to cultivate relationships and community at the speed of trust. Choosing depth over breadth, and saying no to opportunities that would stretch a community too far. Sacrificing our short-term ambitions for something more durable — relationships and trust that can bend without breaking, hold complexity without collapsing, and be carried by many over time.

Generational

We must commit to the work, relationships, and structures that outlast us, not the quick fixes or silver bullets.

Too much of our civic life is built for quick fixes. We chase silver bullets and saviors: the new politician that will heal our divisions, the new technology that will reconnect us, the new program that will finally make things right. But it is these quick fixes that replicate the same managerial, distant, transactional patterns that weakened our civic life in the first place. While the moment may feel urgent, the transformation we need takes time — because trust takes time.

In our civic future, we trade urgency for durability. We work with intention, building structures anchored in loyalty to our communities and adaptability to their changing needs, and cultivating relationships that will outlast any individual or organization. We plant trees we won’t sit under.

What does this future look like? Building systems of accountability that help you stay the course when the work gets hard, and revenue and governance structures that sustain you through it. Embracing experimentation and learning in public, documenting what works and what doesn’t so others can build on your experience. Bringing institutions along, inviting them in to grow and change alongside you.

Civic renewal will never happen over a season, a year, or even a decade; it always has been and will be a project that unfolds over generations.

JOIN US

Our civic life can only be renewed by us choosing to build something that lasts in the places that hold us. This isn’t a call to join an organization or sign up for a program. We’re not trying to sell you some new solution. We’re simply inviting you to sign onto this letter and join us in committing to a new civic future (no title, grant, or organization necessary).

For those working on civic renewal in your own community: We see you, and hope you find something in this letter that speaks to you. Don’t lose faith, and keep cultivating the groups, gatherings, projects, and relationships that make your place better. Add your story to this one. Contribute your lessons learned.

For the millions of Americans yearning for a sense of agency: We invite you to apply these principles in your own life. Take this letter as permission that you don’t need permission anymore. Try something new with your neighbors. Find the thing in your community you want to improve, and work on it.

For national organizations: We invite you to consider how your role can help promote localism as a part of civic renewal. If you can’t complement local work and commit to places for the long haul, consider asking yourself, “Should I really be here?“ If you are going to enter communities, leave these places better than you found them.

For philanthropy: We invite you to take a step back from managing communities, and take a step toward trusting them. Invest in distributed networks that bring together people working in their own places. Build real relationships with people stewarding their particular places, and invest in them for long enough to see what emerges.

Regardless of where you sit, if you see your work in this vision, we invite you to join us by signing onto this letter.

We see signing on to these values as an act of civic aspiration. A way of saying: “The future can be like this.”

But, it can also be seen as an act of civic commitment. A way of saying: “I’ll work to make it so.”

We welcome your commitment to our new civic future.

Sign On

Original Signatories & Authors

Savannah Barrett, Art of the Rural & Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange

Pete Davis, Join or Die

Kate Hanisian, YMCA of Greater Cincinnati

Ash Hanson, Department of Public Transformation

Darryl Holliday, News Futures & Commoner Co

Liz Joyner, The Village Square

Naudy Martinez & Evan Vahouny, Falls Church Forward

Adrian H. Molina & Evan Weissman, Warm Cookies of the Revolution

Sam Pressler, Connective Tissue

Daniel Stid, American Enterprise Institute

Richard Young, CivicLex

Fortunately, I was able to get myself (relatively) together for this Q&A, and it didn’t disappoint. We explored several questions that, themselves, could have made for full conversations. What does a tool for conviviality actually look like in practice? How does someone like L.M. hold the responsibility to bear prophetic witness with the responsibility to build the imagined convivial society? What does the right relationship with our tools look like, such that it can cultivate both independence and interdependence?

This conversation was incisive, expansive, and challenging in all the best ways. Please consider giving the full Q&A a read below. And please do subscribe to The Convivial Society on Substack if you haven’t already. It’s one of the few “must-read” newsletters for me each month, and I imagine it may become a “must-read” for you, too (if it isn’t already).

- Sam

Share

You chose to name your newsletter The Convivial Society, a phrase from Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. Can you share a bit about why you chose that name, and what Illich imagined a “convivial society” could look like?

The title of the newsletter pays homage to Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, but also more subtly, to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society. The convivial society is something opposed to the technological society. I saw Ellul, from whom I’ve learned a lot, as a strident critic of the way that modern technological society is ordered. Illich, himself, is indebted to Ellul: There is a genealogy of ideas shared from one to the other.

For Illich, conviviality involves “learning to live well together,” and it’s an alternative to the life implied in industrial-scale institutions. It’s worth noting that Ilich uses the terms “tools” and “institutions” interchangeably. Illich defined convivial tools — as opposed to industrial-age institutions — as human-scaled. A convivial society does not ask the human to operate at the scale of the machine, but rather configures human relations to be more hospitable to proper human scale. That can be in terms of scales of speed, scales of size, or scales of power. There are various ways in which we operate at scales that are not conducive to the flourishing of the embodied, fundamentally limited creatures we are.

There’s also a freedom in conviviality for Illich. In his view, in an industrial society, we become slaves of disabling institutions. Illich believed institutions that set out to improve our world, once they pass certain thresholds, become counterproductive, even destructive. They create dependencies rather than empower. Illich wanted us to operate with tools that we could enter into a relation of freedom with; we would not be subservient to the tool, but the tool could serve our own human ends.

The last thing conviviality suggests is the practice of hospitality. It was this simple act of welcoming, of sharing a meal, and of sitting across the table from somebody that became very important for Illich in his later writings.

To make it more concrete, what does it look like when tools and institutions pass the realm of human-scale and become counterproductive to human freedom?

In his early work, Illich sees the professions that gather around counterproductive tools and institutions as disabling. The effect of these professions is not to give us the strength, imagination, or resources to confront the world in networks of interdependence. Sometimes one could read Illich as if he is advocating for rugged individuals who are able to care for themselves and make their own way in the world. But there’s an important passage in Tools for Conviviality — which I don’t know quite by heart — where he says that we ideally achieve autonomy or independence for the sake of mutual interdependence. We learn to rely on each other as parts of communities that have the strength and resources to order their lives according to their values. In these communities, we do not have to cordon off areas of life and hand them over to the offices or auspices of an institution.

One striking example of this, which gives us a sense for how much the world has changed, involves burials. While writing in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Illich talks about how a generation ago, burials were handled within the community. You mourned the deceased in their home. They were buried by their friends. It was an intimate, communal affair. Now this has been handed over to the undertaker: This communal, familial rite that humans have performed for themselves since time immemorial has now become a service rendered at cost by a professional class. Illich sees this sort of pattern as an outcome of the institutions of the industrial-age.

Another example of this is at the beginning of Deschooling Society, where Illich says that for many people, “their ability to learn will be undermined by their association of learning with schooling.” The institution of the school mistakes a process in the administration of a service for the actual outcome. The one thing students learn in school is how to mistake process for an outcome and a diploma for competency. We can see this: Schools became credentialing factories that give us a pass into adult life, rather than places that genuinely educate for freedom and competency. Illich would say you see this because there is no end, just a continual accretion. These days, an MA or more is required for entrance into certain fields. Yet, we know instinctively that what we’re getting is a piece of paper that gives us entry. This escalation is part of the counterproductivity that Illich identifies.

I know you said Illich used “tools” and “institutions” interchangeably, but what you just shared seemed like it had more to do with institutions and professions. What, specifically, does a “tool” against conviviality look like and a “tool” for conviviality look like?

I would point to tools where we outsource: GPS is a good example. It feels like it empowers you, and it gives you this ability to navigate new cities that you may be visiting or your own city. But the cumulative effect is that all of these individual instances of being seemingly empowered — or, of gaining a measure of efficiency in getting from point A to point B — ultimately de-skills the person who finds it almost impossible to operate without that tool.

It’s amusing to me to talk to those who have never known a world without GPS. People used to just get around. They eventually learned their way around the city. They figured out how to read the city grid. They asked for directions. It worked, and there was a measure of competency that came with that. Now, a lot of people joke that they can’t navigate their own town without GPS. That may seem like a trivial example, but it’s one instance in a larger pattern of individuals feeling increasingly dependent on the tool. They lose competencies, and thus a sense of confidence, purpose, satisfaction, and autonomy in the world.

The convivial tool is basically the opposite of the GPS — a tool you can use in a way that empowers your skills. The map and the compass are very different tools from the GPS device. They require something of you. They will train you in their use in a way that you gain skills. That’s part of the picture for Illich.

The underlying question has to do with our vision for human flourishing: What is the good that we are after? If our vision for human flourishing is to optimize the self as a node in the technologized market network and serve that system to become efficient consumers and producers, the tools that help you get there are of a certain sort. But if human flourishing consists in relationship, in the assortment of skills that sometimes were labeled arts — the art of dying, the arts of memory — then they’re not skills to be optimized, or techniques to be applied, but rather arts and virtues to be cultivated.

Recently, I was at a conference and I was asked: “What technology is an ideal technology?” I usually freeze in those moments, but I had Hannah Arendt on my mind, so I said, “Well, the table.” Things that we don’t think about as tools can be very conducive to flourishing. The table is a piece of human artistry and craftsmanship. It serves a purpose. It brings people together while maintaining their distinction. It allows for conversation, for feasting, for celebration.

Before we go deeper on Illich, Ellul, Arendt, or anyone else, I’d be curious to hear about your pathway into writing, teaching, and becoming such a faithful steward and carrier of their traditions?

As part of my theological education, I was reading The Way of the (Modern) World by Craig Gay, a sociologist who was examining how we often fail to live in accord with our professed beliefs. We have professed values, and yet there’s the evident disjunction between our practice and those professed beliefs. What accounts for this disconnect? In certain strands of religious traditions, one answer to that question is insufficient knowledge: You just need better information, better theological education, and the like.

But Gay suggested that we are formed by the habits implicit in our economic structures, political structures, and scientific technological structures. As we participate in those structures at a pre-rational level, we are being shaped and formed by them. I began to care about understanding the technological structures of our society, in part, because I cared about becoming a certain kind of person. I cared about closing the gap between my professed beliefs, moral aspirations, and actual practice. This is how I got introduced to the work of Arendt, Ellul, and Lewis Mumford — all of whom are very important to me.

I later read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which was my introduction to virtue ethics and the importance of practices. It reinforced caring about tools because they enter a loop of mind, body, and world. Tools are not just an expression of our desires, but they form our desires. Tools are not just an expression of our agency, but constrain and empower our agency. The media ecology angle also became a part of my formation — through Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others — so that it was not just our action into the world that was being mediated by our tools, but our perception of the world. In particular, whatever tools we use to “see the world” mediate the world to us in a specific way.

I’m continually drawn to that larger question of what it means to be a human being, and to the moral dimensions of human existence — and so were these writers. I’ve often described my writing as an attempt to lead others to their work. One of the best compliments I can be paid is, “I read about Jacques Ellul, or Simone Weil, or Hannah Arendt in your work, so I went out, bought the book, and read it for myself.” Mission accomplished.

Your writing has directed me to a lot of these thinkers. This is making me think about your “Amulets Against the Spirits of the Age” piece. In it, you shared this quote from Simone Weil that I found myself returning to frequently last year: “You could not be born at a better time than the present, when we have lost everything.”

I read your work as situated in this prophetic tradition of many of the people you’ve already mentioned — Simone Weil, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Ivan Illich, Hannah Arendt, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and Wendell Berry. How do you think of your role in contributing in this moment? How do you hold the responsibility to bear prophetic witness alongside the responsibility to help build the imagined convivial society?

I’ve struggled with this a bit. Because inevitably the question is, “Well, what then? What now? What’s the practical application?” I understand that question, and I sympathize with it. However, I’ve made peace with the fact that I don’t know that it’s for me to imagine what the answers are. I tend to highlight questions because I think part of the problem is this rush to the answer. Part of what I want to do is slow down our thinking — both for myself and others.

If you press these questions far and deep enough, you find a very different orientation toward the world. It’s the way of being that sees the world as a set of problems to be fixed and to which engineering solutions can be applied. The world becomes a field for us to realize our own aspirations, desires, and wants — where we bring to bear our technical apparatus and knowledge in such a way that the world conforms to our desires and wishes, so that we can act in it with power. This perennial temptation has particular force in the modern world, and it’s explicit in the Western context, where humanity has gained an enormous amount of power over the world (and much of it for the good).

But what gets lost in that way of thinking is a relation to the world that perceives it, first and foremost, as a gift — something to be received, known, and loved in its own right. Obviously there are many philosophical, metaphysical, and religious assumptions at work when I’m articulating that distinction. Because of my own metaphysical and religious commitments, I try to see the world as something to be received with gratitude, as a gift. But even Hannah Arendt — who’s not, herself, a religious person — talks about receiving the world as a “gift from nowhere,” but still as a gift.

That doesn’t mean we should become passive participants in history, but where you start matters. Whether you recognize any constraints to that project matters. Whether you have fundamental gratitude out of which you are working — and a love out of which you are working — that matters a great deal.

I am trying to understand these deeper patterns and logics at work in the modern world, question them, and help recalibrate our fundamental orientation to the world. I am actually a temperate and moderate person, yet all the thinkers I’m drawn to are much more radical in their tenor, temperament, and writing. So that line from Simone Weil is purposefully evocative and challenging. These thinkers push us to ask deeper questions — to the degree where we are uncomfortable with the practice and conduct of our own lives.

Well, you may not agree, but one area where I feel like you’ve been bearing prophetic witness — or, at least, helping people make sense of the world — involves what we’re experiencing around AI. Your most recent piece on “Manufactured Inevitability and the Need for Courage” helped me connect some dots in my own experience.

Just yesterday, I noticed that when I opened Gmail, it was offering to summarize my conversations and automatically complete my sentences. This is what I had in mind when I wrote about manufactured inevitability. People want us to believe that all of this is inevitable — that it’s a natural force, and they’re not responsible for it — and that “resistance is futile.” It’s framed as if we’re facing a choice: Either jump on the bandwagon, or get left behind. Yet, what we see is that this inevitability is manufactured: I didn’t ask for Gmail to auto-summarize or auto-write my emails, but now I have to search through the settings to figure out how to disable it.

A critique of that rhetoric has to be paired with the recognition that you can’t put genies back in the bottle. Once tools are created and put into general use, you have to cope with the world in which these tools exist. The concept of “technological momentum” from the historian Thomas Hughes is helpful here. Early on in development of tools and systems, there’s flexibility. Things can go one way or the other. But over time, especially as infrastructure is developed, you get a momentum that locks certain tools into place and makes it hard to operate without them or against them.

But my chief problem with the rhetoric of inevitability was that it was deployed by those who wanted to foreclose our thinking and judging. It doesn’t want us to think about whether this would be a good development or not for us. Often, it was assumed that it would be good — the new device, the new efficiency, the new mode of optimization — but good for what and good for whom? Maybe good for the bottom line of a company. Maybe good in discrete ways for some individuals. But many of these tools have not been good for us.

I’ve been talking about AI over the past year, with reference to Joseph Weizenbaum, as a fundamentally conservative technology. It is being constructed and deployed to save the appearances of the old systems that we’ve been operating on that may otherwise teeter and collapse. This collapse would give us the freedom, in the spirit of Weil, to imagine new and better forms of life. Weizenbaum argued that computation arrived in the second half of the 20th century to save the day for these older, bureaucratic, often lifeless institutions. AI is being deployed to do the same thing — saving those institutions, ways of life, and modes of being — rather than allowing us to imagine alternatives.

What do you see as a better way for us to relate to this so-called inevitable technological “progress?”

I had an about page on my first blog that articulated the idea that neither a reflexive antagonism nor an unthinking adoption were the right mode. Neither of them had critical reflection. As Arendt put it, “We ought to think what we are doing.” But we need time for that. We also need communities to do this in. Should I decide that adopting certain technologies is not conducive to my own vision of human flourishing — for myself or for my family — there are a few things that I could do within my household. But there’s more that I can do if I’m working with others in small-scale communities. Of course, one of the trends implicit in the technological structures of modernity is that they isolate us. They make it difficult to form the moral communities of deliberation and practice that can help us slow down, think, and make choices.

I once wrote about the tech-savvy Amish, who understood that the adoption of a new tool wasn’t a matter of moral indifference. It wasn’t a neutral thing that you add into the community. They understood that communities are ecosystems. When you introduce a new species into an ecosystem, you don’t just get the same ecosystem plus a new species — you get something wildly different, or, possibly, even ecosystem collapse. So, the Amish decided that they would make deliberate choices about the tools that they introduced into their community. They’re not anti-technological, and they’re not trying to lock in the 19th century, but they are trying to preserve a certain form of communal life.

The advantage is that they’ve managed to operate within small-scale communities. They have that space of moral deliberation, a measure of communal authority, and collective buy-in to their shared project. Most of us don’t have those things, so we find ourselves constructing the communities we need to sustain us as we simultaneously attempt to make the choices we need to sustain us.

In the beginning, you said something about how Illich blows up this supposed tension between freedom and community. Typically, autonomy and community — individualism and communitarianism — are presented in direct opposition with one another, but what I heard you say is that genuine freedom is found through interdependence, or vice versa. Before we close, can you draw out this line of thinking further?

One way I’ve formulated this to myself is, “What is it good for a human being to do, regardless of whether a machine can do it as well or better?” Even if I grant that this AI tool is able to do a task as well as humans, even if it could pass whatever variation of the Turing Test is appropriate to this domain, the question is not, “Can the machine do it?” The question is, “Ought we still to do it anyway, even if we do it worse?” G.K. Chesterton has this line about how “anything that’s worth doing is worth doing badly.” If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing, period.

I thought about this a couple years ago, when AI-generated images were becoming less laughable. Here’s this tool that can produce this sophisticated, glossy image that I could never produce myself. I couldn’t use computer software to generate it. I couldn’t draw it. So do I then stop drawing? If my child presents me with a rough, childlike picture of our living room, do I say, “You know, you could have just prompted DALL-E?”

No, of course not. Because that seemingly inadequate, comparatively deficient rendering was satisfying. If she were to keep at it, she would cultivate a skill. There was something she could take pleasure in. There’s something good about that attempt, regardless of the quality of the outcome. And I think this goes back to that question of, “What is it good for us to do even if a machine can be made to do it as well or better?”

Because as we learn to do things and we persist in doing things, we build up a reservoir of skill, depth, capacity, and autonomy. Then we can call on one another to help one another in community. recently wrote a piece about drills and neighbors that exemplified how this autonomy and interdependence could be complementary. In it, he says something like: “You don’t need to go to the Home Depot and buy a new drill. You can go across the street and ask your neighbor to borrow his.” Maybe your neighbor then says, “Well, I’ll come over. Let me help you.” This is how you build resilient communities. You can stand back from that work and realize that you have saved yourself some money. You have accomplished something that you can say, “I did this.” And, you did it with the help of your neighbor.

When you do something with somebody, you build this little shared memory. It’s a thread in the fabric of the community that you’ve just introduced. You do that enough, and you begin weaving it more tightly. Because we are dependent creatures, we can re-learn to depend on one another. We can re-learn to build trust. I think there’s a path there. But if we choose to allow the machine to continuously usurp our roles, functions, skills, and talents — however middling they may be — we will become more and more dependent on these tools and institutions, and we will become less capable of the interdependence and mutual aid that’s fundamental to our human existence.

Subscribe now

Last October, I found myself in the Appalachian mountains near Roanoke, VA — in what was functionally a glorified high school gymnasium — to watch my favorite band, The Turnpike Troubadours, perform live for the first time.

A lot of the concerts I attend have pretty good gender balance, but not this one. I sat in my seat and soon realized that I was surrounded by a sea of young-ish men, most ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 40s. Some of these men, like me, had dragged their significant others along. But a remarkable number of these men seemed to be attending the concert alone.

Immediately in front of us sat three solo men: a 50-something — squat, and with a white goatee — sandwiched between two 30-somethings wearing mesh hats and hoodies. My wife and I were actively rooting for them to interact before the show. Talk! Buy each other beers! Anything! Instead, they acted like most of the solo men around us: They made no small talk between opening acts, and they stared down at their phones until the concert started.

But when the concert did start, a switch flipped. To my left, to my right, everywhere I looked: individual men, singing at the tops of their lungs, some with tears in their eyes. We sang about broken relationships and returning home on “The Bird Hunters.” We sang about losing family members to addiction in “On The Red River.” The crescendo came when the band played one of their most popular songs, “Good Lord Lorrie.” All around me, men shouted lyrics of loss and longing:

And I’ve been learning that believing and that barely breaking even

It’s just a part of life for you and me

And I’ve been living with the loneliness, it’s got down in my bones I guess

It’s just another phase of being free

And I’ve been learning how to lose a thing I never laid a hand on all along

Well good lord Lorrie, I love you, could it go more wrong

Well good lord Lorrie, I love you, could it go more wrong

I’ve been returning to this concert experience a lot recently as my friend, Soren Duggan, and I have been doing qualitative research on the relational lives of men without degrees. In our interviews, Soren has been asking open-ended questions about friendship, community, role models, and purpose. Here’s what we are not seeing: the stereotype of the man who is very online, very closed up, and very resentful. Rather, what we are seeing looks a lot more like this concert: a sea of isolated young men, openly expressing their feelings of hurt and struggle, yearning for connection but not knowing where or how to begin.

This is not another “what’s wrong with men?” piece, and it’s not another “here’s how we ‘fix’ men” piece. This is a piece in search of understanding — and I believe one “keyhole” for this understanding is in the emotional resonance of groups like The Turnpike Troubadours and their fellow Oklahoman, Zach Bryan.

“I’m condemned, I’m condemned, oh my heart is on the mend”

The pathway to The Turnpike Troubadours for me — as it has been for many men my age and younger — was none other than Zach Bryan, who counts Turnpike as one of his favorite bands. If you haven’t listened to Bryan’s music, you’ve probably still heard about him: He’s gone from serving as a relatively unknown enlisted sailor to building a male-heavy, Springsteen-level following in half a decade. In an era of “Me More Cowboy Than You” working-class cosplaying, Bryan is a genuine “everyman” who somehow accidentally cracked the algorithm and now sells out stadiums (including a concert with the “largest ticketed crowd in U.S. history”).

I first came across Bryan in 2019, when the YouTube algorithm fed me his cover of Jason Isbell’s “Dress Blues.” My eyes started welling up as I was mid-response to some random emails, and I wondered, “Who the hell is this guy?” I soon found myself down the rabbit hole, listening to his early songs like “Godspeed,” “Don’t Give Up On Me,” and “Letting Someone Go” on repeat. I remember listening to songs like “Sweet DeAnn,” Bryan’s ode to his late mother, and thinking, “Man, this guy wears his heart on his sleeve”:

Sweet DeAnn, I miss you so

And your words go where I go

The reasons? I don’t know

But I’ll sing ‘em loud and slow

So you can hear me from the Heavens

And you can draw my thunder down

I miss havin’ you around

But in my heart, you’re always found

I also remember listening to the opening lines of “Condemned” and thinking, “Man, this guy is hard on himself”:

I’m condemned

I’m condemned

Oh, my heart is on the mend

Nobody gives a damn about me

You can tell me that you love me ‘til your little lungs turn blue

But I’m always alone when I fall asleep

The fact that Bryan has cultivated such a devout male following with lyrics like this is no accident; it’s a sign of his emotional resonance with young men’s experiences. Our interview transcripts with these guys read much less like a manosphere podcast and much more like a Zach Bryan song.1

Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t trying to be stoics; they’re often emotionally aware to the point of wearing their hearts on their sleeves:

“I was a mess throughout my 20s. I could not hold it together. Every anniversary of every person in my life who’s died, I was a mess, and it was all going totally unchecked. In the midst of that, my close friends were all casualties. I was just burning bridges left and right … I could not handle my emotions at all, and so I … went on a decade of rampage, just, ‘all right, delete that friend, delete that friend,’ and, now, I don’t have any friends.” - P., 33

Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t self-assured; they’re often unconfident, uncertain, and, at times, deeply insecure:

“I have absolutely low self-esteem… That stops me from [making friends]. I’m afraid of just embarrassing myself.” - J.B., 27

Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t on the path to self-optimization; they’re often just grasping for something, anything really, to hold onto in their lives:

“I’m just trying to figure out something I want to do in my life that’s gonna change my community in a positive light. I’m looking for purpose — something bigger than me — something that can make change in someone’s life or my life. I’m just here, just passing by — and that doesn’t sit well with me.” - V., 29

Like Bryan, the men without degrees we interviewed aren’t looking to the old scripts of stoicism, machismo, and rugged individualism to live a good life. They’re emotionally open, self-critical (often, overly so), and yearning for camaraderie. And, like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed are grasping for something new — new community, new friends, new mentors, new purpose — but what they’re grasping for often proves elusive.

“I’ve had a couple great friends, and losing them hurt too bad”

But what connects Bryan and Turnpike to their audiences and the men we interviewed isn’t just this emotional resonance; it’s also a shared experience of addiction and its ripple effects. Bryan announced his sobriety late last year after he found himself in a “downward spiral” from drinking. The Turnpike Troubadours took an “indefinite hiatus” in 2019 so that their lead singer, Evan Felker, could get sober before returning to the stage. A young Bryan even wrote a song about Felker’s alcoholism and recovery: “Felker, we need you here / To re-affirm our fears / Felker, won’t you get well / You’ve got stories to tell.”

For Bryan and Felker, the losses that often accompany addiction are personal. Both Bryan’s mom and Felker’s dad passed away due to alcoholism, and both have written about their parents’ addiction and deaths. On “From a Lover’s Point of View,” Bryan writes: “But now’s about the time, look, you really got to decide / Are you gonna be a good man to me or die the way your mother died?” And, in “On The Red River,” Felker’s memorial to his father, he shares:

On days off, we’d help out our neighbors

And we smiled and we sweated for free

You’d earned every drink with your labor

And I’d sleep on your front seat ‘til three

And you’d call it a cure for a snake bite

And reach for a fifth of Old Crow

Some medicine should get your head right

When your symptoms were starting to show

If the shadow of addiction, loss, and the hurt it causes looms large in Bryan’s and Felker’s words, it looms just as large in many of the interviews we’ve conducted with young men. We asked no questions about addiction, yet it has come up in many of our interviews, especially when we ask about friendship:

“Throughout my life, I’ve had trouble relying on anybody, with both my parents being alcoholics. I’m not placing blame, but … they weren’t reliable. I just learned, ‘You can’t rely on other people. Rely on yourself.’ ... So then it becomes harder to start a friendship, because what the person interprets as you being cold and standoffish is just my inability to feel like I can rely on another person.” - J., 43

“I had a couple close friends die from drug overdoses. Then my last girlfriend … the way she was [drinking] was a whole lot different, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.” - A., 39

“If the whole point of a friendship is to get to a point where that friendship creates a bond that puts them where they’re pretty much family … I think that’s like the overall goal, as far as God’s concerned, is that we’ll get to where we’re all close together and rely on one another and look for what we can do for one another … but I’ve had a couple great friends, and losing them hurt too bad. I don’t know if it’s worth it to me to experience that again.” - D., 40

Stories like these of addiction and loss aren’t just incidental to Bryan’s and Felker’s songs or our interviews; they are fundamental. For Bryan, Felker, and many of the men we’ve spoken to, the experience of addiction and loss is what often shatters existing relationships and hinders them from building new ones.

“Come back from the dark somehow”

But addiction and broken relationships haven’t gotten the last word for Bryan or Felker. Both have become the flawed heroes of their own redemption myths built on sobriety and relational repair.

For Bryan, redemption has a lot to do with overcoming his family genes of alcoholism. The chorus of his new song, “DeAnn’s Denim,” includes the lines: “And are you strong enough to stay away from family genes? / ‘Cause DeAnn’s denim was a stubborn thing,” and concludes with, “I cleaned out the closet, found some closure when I threw those old blue jeans on the floor.” Meanwhile, for Felker, the anchor song of The Turnpike Troubadours’ most recent album, “Heaven Passing Through,” is explicitly about his redemption in returning to his marriage and becoming a father:

Now we stare up and I say constellations that I know

You repeat ‘em back, but you don’t care, you’re only three years old

It’s nice to see the world the same as someone

It feels so good to be up late, pretending that I’m young

Like Felker and Bryan, most of the men we interviewed haven’t given up. None of them sees themselves as victims, and almost all of them are seeking some form of redemption, too. For some, it’s in building relationships. For some, it’s in becoming mentors and role models. For some, it’s in contributing to something bigger than themselves.

“The younger generation coming up, they’re lost too. I want to try to give them an answer on how to be a good man. Like, ‘It’s okay to cry; that doesn’t make you less of a man. You don’t have to be this tough guy all the time.’ That’s where I’m at.” - V., 29

“If I was a part of something, I wouldn’t be looking for friends. I could find friends inside of the organization that I belong to. I could always have somebody to go to for advice or for help. I could feel like I always have a team … That’s the bottom line. I just want to be a part of a team.” - K., 31

The challenge is that most of these men don’t know where to begin. They are not rockstars like Felker or Bryan whose words are overanalyzed in pieces like this. They are mostly disconnected men whose experiences are mostly invisible because of their isolation. The connections these men do have, if any, are tenuously held, and the gulf between them and new relationships — be they friends or mentors — feels overwhelmingly vast.

Which brings me back to that Turnpike Troubadours concert. About halfway through the show, Felker belted the moving chorus of “Heaven Passing Through”:

Come back from the dark somehow

Finally living in the here and now

No sign of a thundercloud following you

Don’t take it personal

The world don’t turn around you

Hold on to the moment like it’s Heaven passing through

As the song concluded with those same lines, something simple but profound happened. The older man in front of us embraced the younger men to his left and his right in each of his arms. Then, a brief group hug, followed by a few high fives and a beer run.

A gulf closed. A place to begin.

Subscribe now

Read more