General
Analog Connections
Sep 29th
So, if you’re reading this blog entry, you’re most likely someone who knows me via my ‘online personality’. You’re someone who probably listened to the podcast or followed me on twitter or possibly ran across my Mustardseed video podcast. If that’s the case, you have, for sure, noticed something that all three of those links have in common. They’ve all recently “gone out of business”. I’ve disconnected much of my online life in favor of pursuing other connections and, as I’ve recently said, “I don’t miss it one bit!”
Did you notice that I assumed that most people reading this entry were not people I know in real life? Sure, there’s some exceptions (“Hi Mom!”) but most people who know me don’t need to read my blog because, well, they know me. They see me at least once a week. They run into me at Starbucks. They stop in for coffee or we work on projects together. In my new, more analog, life, connections aren’t made or fostered online…they’re carried out around a kitchen counter. Literally.
I think our society expects us to have too many friends…too many connections. We’re encouraged to put quantity over quality. We’re expected to stay in touch with people who move thousands of miles away. We’re expected to run our kids from one friends house to the next. We have the burden of popularity, the need to be loved by many, the drive to make more connections with our limited time an attention. I’m done with that. I will have few friends. I will make few connections. I will spend most of the time with my family (both immediate and extended). I will make those relationships deeper and willfully let quantity fall by the wayside.
It’s not that I don’t want to be friends with you, oh dear blog reader. I look at all the amazing connections I’ve made through my online life. People I’ve tweeted with, blogged alongside, and facebooked. People I then met in ‘real life’ at conferences, meetups, and trainings. You are awesome and I wish I could be your friend. However, I’m now fully convinced that relationships can’t be built online, only introductions or surface acquaintanceships. I need some more serious weight on that corrupted word: Friend.
How can you be my friend if I never see you to give you a man-hug (ya know, with the manly pat on the back so we don’t look too girly)? How can I be your friend if I can’t give you a hand lifting something heavy or loan you a tool when you need to fix your car? How can you be my friend if you don’t really know me through day to day conversation? Sure, you can be an acquaintance. But not a friend. Not someone I can call in an emergency or someone I can lean on when I’m weak. We have too many ‘friends’ in this Facebook-world and almost none in our actual living, breathing, human experiences.
So, (to take this question further to a problem it presents when the premise is accepted) with fewer, better, analog friends: How do we stay in touch? How do we continue our friendship in a world built on Facebook and Twitter?
I ask this because I sit here in Starbucks alone. I yearn for some of those analog connections, yet to get them I have to fire up Twitter. I have to text my peeps. I have to use these ‘tools of distraction’ to make these connections happen. We no longer live in a time when you can mail someone a letter (that would just be strange!) or even call them and say “let’s hang out”. These methods no longer fit into lives crammed full of instant and unobtrusive communications. We’re no longer able to just pop over to someone’s house or show up at their workplace because privacy and efficiency are more important than relationship. We live in a world so separated and segregated that communicating directly is just plain rude since these connections are not run through our junk mail filter or archived in our Visual Voicemail box.
So, these two concepts sit side by side. We need fewer and more analog friendships. Yet, in this world we’re forced to use digital tools if we want those to happen. What’s the cure? I suppose it has something to do with living closer together (this could mean city or small towns) and putting relationship over work…quality over quantity.
I strive for this change everyday. The problem is…you can’t do it all by yourself. So, who’s in?
Living in a post-WWII country
Aug 5th
I’m not sure if everyone else has the level of nostalgia that I do, but it sure doesn’t look like it. The reason I assume they don’t is that no one else seems to long for a time before industry, technology, and the hustle of normal life in the same way that I do. All of my daydreams are of big open and empty spaces created by the hand of God, not by some dude in a factory. I dream of the day when I can cancel my internet service and get rid of my cell phone because I live in a town where everyone I know is a 30 minute walk from my front door and I buy all my groceries from a farmer just down the road. The problem is that this type of world has disappeared, or is rapidly disappearing from this country and I don’t believe it will ever return unless we have no other choice.
The more I thought about the disappearance of this world, the more I traced it to a single and monumental time in our history: World War II. I used to think that our country had it’s most radical shift in lifestyles and ideas during the 1960s and Vietnam war…but the further I traced it the more I realized that the 60’s were only the practical and inevitable outcome of a post-WWII country. The explosion may have happened during the Nixon years, but the fuse was lit on a quiet Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor.
Everything we are, everything we know is almost universally a product of the second Great War. (I can hear a big giant “duh” coming from the history crowd) Lifestyles and expectations of what we ‘deserve’ were all born into existence during my grandparents generation. We entered the 1940’s as a mostly rural-focused, simple country. We left that decade an industrial and political super power.
As an example let’s look at the women’s liberation movement. The 60’s get all the credit for freeing women but it was actually done 20 years earlier when Rosie the Riveter beckoned women to the factories and away from the kitchens. This was undoubtedly a step forward for women’s equality (which I embrace and applaud) but it was done at the expense of putting industry and ‘career’ before family (which I heavily regret). It was Rosie that made women strong but the family weaker. It was Rosie who was responsible for helping to win that war but made McDonalds meals the inevitable replacement for women who no longer knew how to cook from scratch.
Speaking of McDonalds…WWII is where our concern for our body’s fuel (ie. food) fell by the wayside. We had better things to do, like win a war…we didn’t have time to worry about what we put in our stomachs. We’d outsource that to Swansons or Kraft. The problem is when the war ended our culture and habits didn’t change. We continued to live in ‘war mode’ eating prepackaged or pre-prepared foods which, as we see now, was killing us just as efficiently (albeit a little slower) than a Nazi bullet.
This whole ‘organic’ food movement is a direct backlash on post-WWII life. When the war ended we have a whole lot of explosives material and factories that we no longer needed. It had to so somewhere. Then someone had the brilliant idea of putting it in our food. No, I’m not kidding. The fertilizer that we now buy in bags from Home Depot is the product of too many unexploded and left over bombs from WWII. The non-organic food we buy in supermarkets is sprinkled with explosives, which is why it’s so huge and green.
How about The American Dream? (and subsequently our overachieving and non-stop lifestyle) A direct product of the War. We came home victorious and proud to a country untouched by the ravages of war. We were strong and wealthy and we started to believe we deserved it. The 1950’s were the living of this dream that we though we deserved. We lived high on the hog in our suburban houses, we all bought cars, we shopped for fancy clothes and built bigger buildings. We all ‘deserved’ dishwashers and washing machines so we bought them. We decided that we and our American Dreams were more important than community and relationship. We worked harder (and more often) to buy more stuff…we neglected our kids and outsourced their development to Mr Rogers, Big Bird, and Ronald McDonald.
I could go on forever but I’ll stop here. We think that this post-WWII world has always been ‘the way it is’…but in reality it’s only 60 years old. Our previous 200+ years were radically different in this country (not to mention our previous thousands of years before this country). We shunned self for community. We worked hard, but not so hard that we neglected family. We raised our own kids and cooked our own food. We talked with people instead of e-mailing @ them. We knew our neighbors and our farmers and we lived with them and supported them emotionally and financially.
And now I wonder how to escape this post-WWII world. How do you live in this era connecting with your family, your neighbors, the land, and God without the distraction and pull of a post-WWII world that constantly tugs on your shirt trying to lead you to a more ‘fulfilling’ life? I have no answer, but I can tell you that I yearn to disconnect from the hussle (not to mention the bustle). I look every day for ways to discard digital life for hard cold reality. Someday I might get there but until then I’ll live each day as an opportunity to move closer to December 6, 1941..just hours before the day that lives in infamy..and the day that changed America and American lifestyles forever.
