I no longer want to live at the end of the world

And other musings on the future of community.

Aug 10, 2022

Hi Folks,

I’ve written this week’s post no less than three times, and each time I start a topic and find myself meandering on loneliness. For most of my life, I thought I was an introvert, and then I moved out and away, and thought I would never be as lonely again in my life as I was during that time. And then I got older and we entered the world of quarantines and isolation and I moved into an apartment by myself for the first time and I realized I was a fool to think I knew loneliness before. That was two years ago, and I still live alone now, though I no longer believe I am an introvert. I do, however, believe that I am unable to effectively make art without this kind of isolation, and thus lies the conundrum.

I spent the last few weeks in a bit of a whirlwind of travel and community, visiting with old friends and spending time with family. I was probably not alone for more than twenty-four hours during the entire last three weeks, and I almost never felt lonely. This is a hard world for the solitary; it’s one that seems to bloom open to those in community. With a friend, a partner, a roommate, a sibling, there are restaurants to visit, concerts to attend, bars to check out. There are parks and coffee shops and museums and sporting events and shopping trips and weekend hikes and brunches and dinner parties and so many other events that seem closed off to anyone not in partnership. Of course, much of that is made up in our heads; all of these places are open to any of us. I am just as welcome to go out to dinner by myself as the next person. But— at least for me— the social aspect of these outings is the whole point. It is to be in community, to remove myself from my isolation and feel that I am a part of the world.

I did many of these things in my last few weeks of being the most social I have been in months. It was great. And yet, during that whole time, I produced almost no creative work. I did not write. I failed to record the podcast, putting us behind production schedule. I wasn’t consuming much media either— the hours I used to spend on the internet were instead spent with other people in real time. But my art faltered.

I’ve been thinking often about the essential question of what creative practice can exist in community with. I spent much of my young life thinking my art could not co-exist with joy, with peace, and balance— that my art required sorrow and desperation, and thus, isolation. As an adult, I’m interested in what art can look like in community, as a chorus of voices, and I find my work these days is often in search of that community. Of seeking out other artists who feel the way I do and bringing us all together. When I began this newsletter, a selfish part of me was hoping it would build that community online that I never felt came easily to me in real life. What could this project look like if it became hundreds of people working together to envision a new rural America? A new South? A new way to make art, one that emphasized empathy and collaboration as much as success and individuality? I am still looking for answers to those questions.

I’ve always been drawn to narratives of the end of the world, especially lately, and it’s only hit me in the last few years that the reason I love them the most is because, in the end times, community becomes unavoidable. Unlike what we know as “the modern world”, community becomes necessary to survive.

I wrote last year about a New York Times profile of Lynx Vilden, who teaches people how to live off-grid in the Oregon wilderness. Then and now, what stands out to me most is this reflection on the kinds of people who seek this lifestyle out: “We imagine that someone striking out into the wilderness is doing so to get away from everyone, to be alone. The people I met wanted the opposite. They want a life where they cannot survive even a day alone. They cannot get food alone, cannot go to the bathroom, cannot get warm alone. They want to be dependent.”

It feeds in to this idea we have of the end times, I think— that off-grid, out where the tax collectors can’t find us and the highways don’t exist and the internet doesn’t work we will all find something essential in ourselves, and it will come through the pursuit— the necessary, survival-ensuring pursuit— of community.

Holly Whitaker describes it in her newsletter Recovering like this:

If you're in a post-apocolyptic film, you almost certainly form a new post-apocalyptic dysfunctional family (whether it's you, a dog, and a robot, or you and Jennifer Lawrence), and that always seems so much better than the kind of community we have in the pre-apocalyptic scenario. There's the aliveness that comes when you're in the Canadian wilderness and your soccer coach needs to have his leg amputated: you find your strength, your power, things inside of you that you Did Not Think Were There, and you grab the fucking hatchet. Sometimes everyone gets a tan, always everyone stops counting calories. Your hair somehow gets better, sinewy muscles often form, and survivor fashion is how I tend to dress anyway. In enough cases, you're in nature all the time* (*if there is any left). Sometimes the earth is regenerating itself with so many less of us around that even ferns grow up through your 42nd floor apartment. Perhaps you learn to cook things and kill things and skin things and make fires from obscure objects or soups from foraged goods. You can stop relying on phones or clocks or Google maps and live by the sun and the moon and the stars.
[My recent fascination] has something more to do with the part where the world as we knew it ends, or your world as you knew it ends, and everything that mattered stops mattering… You have no where to go; all the people that hated you probably die; your career, your purpose, your reputation, your calendar, your unanswered email? Gone. You lose the internet and the backlog of comments, the petty fights, what even is a troll? Fashion stops mattering, so too does productivity hacking, and you don't have to learn about NFTs or crypto or TikTok or Keto. Forget warfare, forget organized religion, forget Who Wore It Best and Botox and taking hair out of your ass and planting it into your eyebrows because now we're supposed to have eyebrows again. There's no professions so degrees don't count unless you have one of five meaningful skills. You have no where to be and nothing to do but survive and all that matters is what's in front of you, the people around you, the shelter above you. Do you have food and water? A knife? Can you start a fire? Are you breathing? You're good, come with me, forget LinkedIn, how Robin Arzon Gets It Done; forget your morning routine, how many steps you took yesterday, your dirty dishes, your last dental check-up, the taxes you owe; forget all of that, the past is dead, anything is possible. How is that not paradise?

When we entered the pandemic as we know it nearly three years ago, I wondered if this might finally be the time we began to live this way. Suddenly everyone was making bread and reading books and moving back home. Life seemed to slow down, even while around us the world grew increasingly worse and the death toll grew by the day. I guess this is the part they leave out of narratives of the end of the world, which usually tend to focus on the survivors. People often die, but we don’t see those stories, or at least they aren’t the focus of the narrative. We expect that there will be loss at the end— the same way that we expect all these other things— the freedom, the bliss, the community— to be gained.

These narratives also give us a vision of rurality that feels nearly impossible to us in today’s world— hence why so many people are turning to Lynx Vilden, to homesteading, to van-life, to off-grid and commune living, to seek it out. I have spent many years telling myself I have no choice; that living this is way is what is required of me to exist in this world. But that’s not entirely true. You always have a choice. Certainly I could quit my job and head out into the forest and never look back— but eventually I might be confronted by a park ranger, or wander onto private property, or end up on a highway in the dead of night when the trail runs out, or find there is no real food to forage the way I had hoped, that I can’t even drink the rainwater, and I would have to turn back. Even rural communities, in this version of the world, the one in which we live, need highways and grocery stores and broadband and cell phone service. Even there, community is still something that must be sought out— community requires patience and time and sowing seeds in relationships and letting their roots spread out and deepen. It’s a lot like farming and gardening and art-making in that way— nothing good will grow overnight.

Perhaps these are all lies I am telling myself. Perhaps I cling to these narratives of impossibility to hold myself back from ever venturing out in the world in this way. I don’t know anymore. What I do know is that I want community more than anything and that desire feels at odds with what the world prioritizes these days. I want to live in a place where it is impossible to go days without speaking to other people, where I cannot possibly survive on my own. The world around us is ending— we have increasing climate change, rising death rates, new viruses popping up every day, crime and violence and warfare, inflation and crashing economies, wildfires and mass floods and hurricanes. It is as bad as any dystopian novel I ever read makes it sound. But we don’t even seem to recognize it is happening. We are still on our computers, sending our emails, scrolling through Twitter. Instead of cultivating community, it seems we are retreating further into ourselves.

What will community look like in the future? In this new world? And not just in the place we end up, but in the place we are now? We have that choice. We have the ability to envision something different. We do not have to wait for the end of the world. We do not have to wait for the cities to crumble or the internet to go out or the airports to shutter. We might not— and truthfully, should not— live as these characters in the stories of the end of the world, but we can begin making choices that help bring us closer together. We can create art that overcomes isolation. We can learn how to walk down the street without headphones in. We can smile at a stranger passing by. We can stop to help someone who looks like they need it instead of just going on with our days. None of these are the easy choices. But if we keep taking the easy choices, if we keep living as if only our own survival matters, then we miss the essential point of being human, which is to find ways to not just live but live together.

That is the truth of every dystopian film ever made. That is the truth of human history. None of us are meant to survive alone. And none of us can.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what the future of community will look like, as well as how we can help cultivate that change. Are we all this lonely, even if we have “made it” in the world on paper? Is anyone else about at the point where they cannot read another piece of life-altering news and go send emails that I hope this message finds you well? Just me? Leave a comment below and let’s get the conversation going.

GOOD FOLK

Discussion about this post