Douglas's note on the election

What we're missing is needing each other

I’ve thought a lot over the years about civic loneliness. The mission of my old business Portland Underground Grad School was “half learning, half community.” The issue has been gaining more attention since the pandemic. Last year, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy issued a warning on the loneliness epidemic: loneliness is worse for people’s health than smoking, alcoholism, or obesity.¹ The World Health Organization recently made loneliness a “global public health concern.”

Capitalism and loneliness

Think about how you spend your weeknights and weekends. Now contrast it to how “soul activist” Francis Weller describes how we have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years:

“… with things that satisfy the soul at the most basic level; adequate levels of touch, you know, comforting in times of sorrow and loss, celebration and gratitude, gathering food together, eating together under the stars, telling stories around the camp fire, you know, laughing and playfulness together, sensuous erotic connection to the wider world. These are what made us human. But for the most part these things have disappeared. Now, we are left with secondary satisfactions— material goods, seeking power, rank, prestige, addictions— and these things never satisfy the soul.

How much time do we spend doing these things Weller calls “the primary satisfactions?” Compare it to how much time we spend on the lonely pursuit of chasing secondary satisfactions.

In the day, we work alone on personal computers. At night we sit in front of TVs. Before 1800s almost every human lived in a large extended family within a larger tight-knit community. Now most everyone lives with at most one or two other people. 27% of us live completely alone.

Not coincidentally, a literature review reveals that almost no one used the word “loneliness” in English before 1800.² Feeling lonely is an experience of modern industrial life.

I’m going to put out something here: in modern society, we long for community, but the reason we don’t have community is that we don’t need each other. And we don’t want to need each other. Instead, we rather buy things that allow us not to have rely on others. We’d rather have arms-length transactional relationships that end with the exchange of money:

The gift relationships that bound [us] together have been turned into goods and services that we buy. So for example, if our house burns down we no longer rely on the community to build another one; we source that from an insurance company. In older cultures, singing and music were ubiquitous; now we purchase music instead of making it together. Food preparation was something we did for ourselves and each other; today in America more than half of all meals are prepared in supermarket delis and restaurants outside the home. Wise advice has become “counseling” or “coaching.” — Charles Eisenstein

Even when we choose to work together, we call it “collaboration,” weak sauce compared to reciprocity of working in community by necessity.

We don’t want to need each other. We have our own kitchen wares, our own washers and dryers, our own personal vehicles.

But the more we don’t have to rely on each other, the less we feel connected to each other.

We don’t want to need each other. Capitalism feeds on this.

But maybe what we're missing, the deep longing to matter and to be connected to each other, is necessitated by needing each other.

We’re having an election on Tuesday November 5

On Tuesday, we’re going to have an election. I don’t know who’s going to win; in fact I think who will be our next President might be contested for a while. But I do know that no matter who wins, we’re still going to need each other.

No matter who wins, why don’t we start there?

As I read the news I get a strong sense that liberals wish that conservatives didn’t exist. And that conservatives wish that liberals didn’t exist. As geographic mobility has increased, we’re even moving away from each other. Because we don’t live with each other anymore, it’s easier now, more than ever, to pretend that the other side is simply a collection of dangerously biased beliefs instead of part of the interconnected Whole. The Other is no longer your co-worker or your neighbor, they’re a two-dimensional figure on the digital screen. But in reality they’re just another human trying to live in the crest and decline of this American empire. At this time of increasing stress, we’ve lost the reciprocity of knowing we are in community with each other.

We don’t want to need each other. Capitalism feeds on this. We also tend to overvalue things we’ve “earned” and undervalue everything else. But people all across the political spectrum, including ones who oppose the way you want the world to work, provide you medical care, grow your food, maintain your critical infrastructure, and do a host of other innumerable things that allow your life to be as good as it is.³ These are people going to their own homes at night, trying to raise their children, trying to find someone to love and, despite all their internal resistance to it, trying to allow someone to love them. They, like you, might be lonely and scared too.

Maybe gratitude is the path forward

There’s a Biblical injunction to love your enemies. It doesn’t say to love your friends and family; that’s facile shit. The real spiritual work is loving your enemies.

Maybe gratitude is the path forward.

This morning Richard Rohr wrote in his daily newsletter:

All spiritual disciplines have one purpose: to get rid of illusions so we can be more fully present to what is…

We’re sleepwalkers. All great religious teachers have recognized that we human beings do not naturally “see”; we have to be taught how.…That’s why the Buddha and Jesus say with one voice, “Be awake.” Jesus talks about “staying watchful” (Matthew 25:13; Luke 12:37; Mark 13:33–37), and “Buddha” means “I am awake” in Sanskrit. 

It’s about consciousness, isn’t it? My friend Patricia Ryan Madson is a revered teacher of improv at Stanford University. She teaches a principle called “Wake Up to the Gifts:

“We’re stuck in our own shell, our own ego, our own desires, and the things that bother us or worry us.  The most important thing I’d like to tell people is to notice how much you are receiving from other people.  Your life is sustained by people who make energy, the food we eat, and the transportation we use.  If you can fill up with understanding how much of life is already a gift, that’s one of the great things that I’d like to share and pass along.”

Waking up is all about consciousness, isn’t it? That’s why my mentor Terces Englehart always asks, “What’s the experience you’re committed to having?” We human beings do not naturally “see,” we have to be taught how. We become where we put our consciousness.

So maybe gratitude is the way forward. Maybe we need to we wake up to the fact that whatever happens post-Nov 5, we will still belong together. We will still matter to each other and will need each other. You might wish that it’s not true. But it is.

Maybe we don’t need to have a loneliness epidemic, worse than smoking, alcoholism, or obesity. What we're missing is needing each other. I’ve written before: when we realize that I belong to you and you belong to me, we’ll make Heaven a Place on Earth. To do so, we need to stop seeking those secondary satisfactions: owning our individual material goods, seeking power, status, and prestige. We’ll have to stop all the habits of mind that separate us and keep us stuck in our own shell, our own ego, our own desires.

We need to return to the acknowledgement that we live in a community of necessity. In return, we’ll find a place that satisfies the soul at the most basic level.

What if we started with gratitude?

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For the curious, I voted for Kang.

Cool opportunity with work with me

This month I’m starting to work part-time for my friend Emily Gowen of PDX Money Coaching by providing her clients her initial two-hour Financial Clarity Intensive. I want to do one or two practice sessions before I start with her real clients. Anyone willing to be a guinea pig? It typically costs $595 but practice with me and it will be free. I just need one or two people to say yes. Send me an email (i.e. hit Reply) if you’re interested!

1. From the linked NYT article: “Thirty-six percent Americans surveyed reported feeling chronic loneliness in the last month, with another 37 percent saying they experienced occasional or poradic loneliness. It’s worse among 18-25 year olds, where a sizable majority reported acute feelings of loneliness in the previous month.

According to health surveys, social isolation and loneliness increases mortality at the same rate as 15 cigarettes a day. And loneliness is about twice as dangerous to our health as obesity. Social isolation impairs immune function and boosts inflammation, contributing to a whole host of illnesses, including arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease.

2. ibid. The appendix to “A Biography of Loneliness” includes a graph depicting incidences of the word “loneliness” in a database of English-language works printed between 1550 and 2000. From 1550 to 1800, the line hovers somewhere between zero and 0.0001 percent.

3. And you for them.