Friday Thread: What's Keeping Us Out of Others' Business?

"It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation, because being surrounded by people — people who love us, or care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes — is about the only way that I, for one, have ever been able to get be... See more

what are the other ways in which we could be caring for one another? What spaces in our lives could we open up to one another? What parameters have been set for us by convention that are keeping us out of one another’s business?

While it's a genuine blessing to have friendships where we sincerely want to know how each other’s lives are unfolding, I realised that I also want more friends who I do life with rather than just talk about my life with. It seems that talking about my life takes me out of it somehow, putting me into a kind of reflective, evaluative mode that often... See more

My point is not that I alone am TRULY GREAT (although that’s obviously the subtext of most of what I write). I just mean that some of us have much, much more to say than just what is absolutely necessary, and when we walk around believing that we should shut the fuck up most of the time, we’re playing by the rules of people who either 1) don’t have... See more

Friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction. To know what is going on in someone’s day-to-day life, to make plans with them, and then reschedule those plans when someone inevitably gets sick, and then bring over Calpol or soup or an extra laptop charger. To water their plants while they’re away, to ask them to take your kids when you’re... See more

Extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege