community

What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.

But as American life reconfigures itself, we may find ourselves rethinking whether our spouses and children are the only ones who deserve our binding commitments.

Loyalists vs Mercenaries — “There are highly loyal teams that can withstand almost anything and remain steadfastly behind their leader. And there are teams that are entirely mercenary and will walk out without thinking twice about it.”

Lorde), all deep friendships generate something outside of themselves, some special and totally other third thing. Whether that thing can be sustained over time becomes the question.

The more hours you’ve put into this chaotic business of living, the more you crave a quieter, more nurturing third thing

Natural Selection — “The differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in heritable traits of a population over time.”

What both of these traits have in common is that I seem to live my life as if I’m under siege. I’m guessing my amygdala is the size of a cantaloupe.

Most of my withered friendships can be chalked up to this terrible tendency of mine not to reach out.

As many lonely people discover far too late, the reliance of children on their parents and, subsequently, of parents on their children, and the reliance of members of communities on each other, are what fill our lives with meaning, our social bonds with substance and warmth, and our futures with hope.

As experience has shown, the world – life itself – is cloudy, contingent and defined by change. As horrifying as the surveillance capitalists’ view of a totally controlled, perfectly articulated and error-free future might be, the inevitable failure of its vision, and the resultant violence – already evident in our fractured worldviews, competing

a belief in oneness was more strongly related to feeling connected with distant people and aspects of the natural world than with people with whom one is close !