On Possibility-Space & Friend-Making
Caffeinated Pondering at the end of 2020
Hello from the Himalayas,
(once again, after a long break)
I hope you had a warm Christmas meal.
With a chain of remarkable events that fueled heated meta conversations about almost everything, the year 2020 will be remembered for being particularly exhausting. From Zoom-parents to medical professionals and armchair-activists to furloughed-employees, this year has been an energy-draining time for almost everyone. Now, it’s time to sleep over and wake up fresh. It’s time to look ahead beyond the mess. It’s time to forget. It’s time to (selectively) ignore. It’s time to start tuning out so we can focus on what actually matters.
‘One Must Cultivate One’s Own Garden’
In the face of disillusionment with the optimistic assurances of the time, Voltaire gave this practical advice in his famous 18th-century novel ‘Candide’. Today, disappointment abounds in incompetent governments & unfit institutions lacking the real ability and/or the intention to help the distressed souls, who despite the contrary evidence, held hopes. This recent tsunami of mass disappointment is particularly unsurprising for self-initiated indies, who have bare minimum expectations of empathy or competence from big-institutional-gatekeepers. This cynical-sounding attitude is also practical and useful in self-selecting a possibility-space to exercise our own free-agency on. Voltaire’s advice is a welcome reminder for indies today on where we can redirect our productive energy to: cultivating our own garden, tinkering inside our garage or lab, devoting ourselves to a personal project that allows us to exercise our free-agency meaningfully. We can and should nurture a deep-felt instinct to tune-out the noise-of-distant-incidents that makes us wither in vain. This is not productivity advice. This is mental wellness advice: reduce your inflated expectations of the kind and extent of meaningful change you can bring about in the whole wide world. Rather, you turn your attention to cultivating your own garden. The good thing about being a free-agent is: you can cultivate a new (digital?) garden every year, or every quarter. You can also cultivate a cooperative farm with your friends.
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Making Close-Friends
For an Indie, there are few things that can provide as much meaning to one’s life as having close-friends with whom you share your strawman plans, unexpected failures and proud wins. People who are on the same frequency as you on what you think/do in your spare-time and people who are eager to have frank chats about it. This year has made this realization acute for me on both kinds of occasions: when I had close-friends on those occasions and when I didn’t. Hence, making close-friends will now be a high priority for me.
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Can we get Online Socialization unstuck?
For various good reasons, many of us (including me) prefer looking for new friends online rather than offline. The problem with online socialization is that we don’t have easy ways to participate in endorphin-boosting activities in sync. Despite massive amount of asynchronous information-exchange online, these small-group, synchronized bonding activities constitute a tiny part of our online experience. Robin Dunbar in his anthropological research on friendships, identifies the following three effective bonding activities used by humans IRL that work by ramping up the stress-reducer hormone endorphin and creating a ‘self-in-other’ feeling. I wonder how can they be done online without reducing them to just more asynchronous information consumption.
Sharing Laughter in sync, in groups of 2-4 people. Are there apps/platforms that are designed around encouraging small-groups to form around sharing laughter in sync?
Sharing Music/Dance in sync. I guess Peloton has hit onto something real with synchronized workouts.
The charts above depict the sudden increase in pain-reducing endorphin and self-in-other feeling, caused by participating in a synchronized dance. Source: Robin Dunbar/Santa Fe Institute
Religion-forming, with shared rituals.
This is a more complex one to be built completely online and naturally lies at a later stage in the evolution of the group-formation process, but we are seeing earnest attempts in various online communities building rituals around things like productivity-optimization or using a new financial system.
A Thing to Note:
Since I’m leaning towards keeping this as a personal note sent to friends instead of a weekly bulletin or publication of some sort, you can expect me to not follow any strict schedule. I would try to go with my personal cadence of writing. On average, I’m guessing it would be roughly once a week, though.
Lastly, here’s a song recommendation (I’ve been replaying this recently) that you might like:
Alright, that’s it for now. Thanks for reading.
Enjoy your Holidays. I’ll talk to you next in 2021.
-Vinay