Social Health

Stay together, I said. It’s going to get hard. Your kids are young. Your careers are just starting to take off. But stay together. Be there, even when it’s hard. Even when it’s inconvenient. After I got off the call, I kicked myself for not remembering a quote by C.S. Lewis: “Friendship is unnecessary,” he wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like... See more

I struggle with the cultural push toward insularity and self-reliance. I suffer from the inertia of screens and the ennui of stuff. I indulge in the brief hit of dopamine comfort that comes from online shopping (the kitchen gadgets, the houseplants, the skincare products). I drink wine to unwind. I sip from the warm cup of promised safety and... See more

You need shared contexts and shared interests. The reason why it’s difficult to make friends as an adult is because where there's shared context (seeing the same people over many months daily i.e. workplaces) there's a lack of shared interests. Where there's shared interest (hobby groups, bookclubs, etc) there's a lack of shared context. A place... See more

Some Weaving is in the neighborhood. We don’t talk about it much, but most social capital is informal social capital. It’s not somebody who sets up a non-profit. It’s somebody who invites her neighbors over for dinner. It’s somebody who rents a food truck and then invites everybody on the block to come out and eat. It’s somebody who starts a

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he Multiplayer Internet needs a Gradient of Presence.

We can be: ...

Alone in Alone Spaces

Alone in Together Spaces

Together in Alone Spaces

Together in Together Spaces

but the presence is a spectrum:

Lean In (Dominant)

Leank Back (Ambient)

“I think the reason there’s such good juicy kitchen gossip, and so much connection happens in the kitchen, is because you are usually kind of doing something repetitive, and that releases something in your mind that creates a space that doesn’t just reside in the brain, but also is something that becomes part of the body. And how often do we do... See more

As Barbara Ehrenreich and Katherine Newman have convincinglyargued, many boomers also had anxiety about falling out of the middle class in their 30s and 40s. But those years of their lives were not subject to constant optimization. The kernels of productivity culture had been sewn, but they hadn’t yet been normalized. Some upper middle-class white... See more