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This week, we’re interviewing ourselves. We wanted to share our personal reflections on the project — both Soren’s perspective as the lead interviewer and Sam’s perspective as the one responsible for making sense of what we heard. We explored many threads throughout the conversation, including:

• What it felt like, emotionally, for us to do this research

• Why we chose a purely qualitative research approach for this project

• What we learned, and what surprised us about what we learned

• And, importantly, whether we’re still friends at the end of this project

This is our first published Connective Tissue Q&A with video. It’s an experiment, so we encourage you to watch it and let us know what you think. If you can’t watch the video, no problem: We’ve included a lightly edited transcript below for you to read.

From the start of this project, we’ve felt a responsibility to steward these men’s experiences with the respect they deserve. We’ve been grateful and heartened that so many of you have done the same.

-Sam + Soren

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Sam: Something that surprised me in reading the transcripts was how emotional the conversations got — these guys really did open up. Is that something you expected? Were you trying to drive towards it? What was it like being in that virtual room as the interviewer, meeting these guys through an Ipsos re-contact survey while they were disclosing some of the most personal, vulnerable, sometimes heartbreaking experiences of their lives?

Soren: Yeah, I expected it to be a lot harder to draw out than it was, and I was shocked and incredibly impressed, honestly, with how vulnerable these guys were willing to be with me. Again, they met me minutes ago over Zoom. I gave a quick spiel as far as the admin side of this interview goes, and then jumped right into it. And the vast majority of guys were willing to, immediately, from the get-go, talk about some very vulnerable and emotional things with me, share some stuff that I think they even might hold closer in their personal lives. They were just very willing to talk about that stuff, and that realization fed a lot into the findings that we had. These guys are much more emotionally open and vulnerable than a lot of people assume them to be. But that doesn’t mean you need to be vulnerable and share all that stuff with a stranger on the internet that you just met. It was very impressive, and I think it speaks a lot to these guys’ strength.

Sam: Can you take me to a specific emotional moment in an interview that stands out to you?

Soren: Yeah, there are a lot. But one stands out, towards the end of the interview process. I talked to a man named Jorge who was in his late 30s, I think early 40s, maybe. And he’s divorced. He had a daughter that he saw occasionally, but he had moved from the place he grew up to Rhode Island, where he hadn’t known anybody in several years, and his relational life was nearly nonexistent. In the beginning of the interview, I think he was a little bit more closed off and was just answering the questions, but we started to dig into what that felt like as somebody who used to have a more robust relational life, and it had left and atrophied and dissolved. The way that he talked about what that felt like to him, and how much he yearned for somebody to connect with, was pretty affecting. He talked a lot about one friend he had met online through playing video games — someone he had only known digitally — but they had become very close over the years. They talked multiple times a week on the phone. It was a deep, deep emotional friendship. And that was, in his words, the one person that he talked to day to day. He was very, very appreciative of that, and it was obviously doing a lot for him, but it left him wanting something more. The way he voiced that, the way he talked about it, was just incredibly vulnerable. And it made me very appreciative of the relational life that I am fortunate enough to have. I thought a lot about that in the coming days.

Soren: Did that come across for you? Reading through the transcripts, listening to the interviews — how did that make you think about your own relationships, your marriage, your own friendships?

Sam: Yeah, it had a really significant effect, to be honest. I think it’s unavoidable not to map some of these guys’ stories onto your own relationships. And I have one friend who I definitely mapped some of these stories onto — particularly the way he blames himself for his isolation and then feels that he has to fix himself. Since going through this project and this research, I’ve spent a lot more time just trying to pump up and bring him out so he doesn’t feel like he’s the only person responsible for doing it.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about this idea of relationships as gifts to be inherited, rather than entrepreneurial prizes to be earned. I’ve been thinking about the generational inheritances I’ve had relationally through my family life — growing up in a community where my whole family was around, being embedded in the institutions that my father and grandparents came up in. I was born into a foundation that made relationship formation and community participation much easier because I had people who were calling me in rather than me having to figure it out for myself. Some of these interviews, as contrasts, really crystallized how much harder it would have been for me, and how much I’ve taken for granted from that experience.

Soren: Yeah, did you think about that before? Was that top of mind for you before this project? Because class was a big part of this study and our question sets, but the inheritance of a relational life and the inheritance of social circles — frankly, that wasn’t something that I fully appreciated before doing this.

Sam: The honest answer is you look at these things from so many different angles, but at a certain point you’ve heard everything. And so it was something that I understood in the back of my mind, right? That one of the most important forms of connection from which we’ve been disconnected is generational connection. But I think having so many of these conversations, and seeing those patterns play out or not play out, took it from a back-of-mind thing to something that is much more present now. Just to be very concrete: I think the one genuinely flourishing man we spoke with is this archetypal example of generational inheritance and generational stewardship. Roger — he was born into a family and religious community life where he was receiving relationships, receiving habits of participation. He then realized his own leadership in that family and in religious and community life. And then he sees it as a core purpose to steward and pass that on to his children so that they can inherit it as well.

And that, frankly, couldn’t have been more distant from the kind of mean experience of the men we spoke with. For most of the guys, it was this real feeling of benefiting from the structure of high school and having friendships through high school, losing that one structure of social interaction, and then not having anything to replace it. And so building connection became this entirely individualistic endeavor, often from a place of deficit: less time, less money, and — crucially — fewer existing relationships. Because the number one thing that helps you build relationships is other relationships.

Soren: Yeah, that makes sense.

Sam: So, to me, a surprise was the emotional openness piece we talked about earlier. I know you said something similar, that in a positive way it kind of caught you off guard: “Oh wow, these guys are really willing to open up.” I think we both had preconceived notions going into the interview process, like anyone does. But I’m curious, maybe outside of that emotional piece that we were speaking to, is there anything else from your experience as an interviewer that surprised you or challenged your expectations going in?

Soren: Yeah, I was very shocked that in all of the interviews, the topic of politics and digital media — or even the internet broadly — rarely came up. We purposefully didn’t ask about it, because it would have taken over the conversation and added a lens we didn’t want. But you would assume that even in talking about other subjects it would come in, right? Everyone is so dominated by media these days. Politics is so present in everyone’s minds. Maybe it’s because that’s the world I was in before, so I just assume everyone thinks about this stuff all the time, and they probably don’t.

Sam: You’re actually the crazy one.

Soren: I learn every day that I’m actually the weirdo and everyone else is quite normal. But I was just very surprised that it didn’t come up. I think the biggest open door for it was the role model and mentor aspect of it. That was the only time it did come up, and guys talked about people that they watched online, a lot of content online meant to provide some sort of shape to masculinity. But beyond that, it just didn’t. And it certainly challenged my assumption that this stuff is dominant in everyone’s mind day to day. I’m sure if I’d asked about it once, we could have talked about it for an hour, but it wasn’t what everyone blamed all their problems on. I thought that it would be. And I still believe that it is the source of a lot of problems in our society — the digital media part, the screen time, everything that goes along with that — but the fact that it wasn’t hyper-present in what they answered with, I think, is encouraging.

Sam: Yeah, reading through, you saw glimmers of online life — video games, for example — right in the background. When we asked the close friendship question, there was definitely a small sub-thread of people who said, “I have friends who I’ve never met in person. I met him on Zoom, I met him through a video game, I met him through an online forum.” So it was there. But, with maybe the exception of Jorge and maybe one other person, very rarely did they consider those online relationships close friendships. Very rarely did they consider those online “communities” real communities. They would often say, “Yeah, it’s just kind of a sporadic thing I do online, but it’s not a real community. We don’t meet in person.”

And so I found the absence of even taking online community seriously, and online friendships seriously, surprising to me. Because sometimes, in this discourse, you’ll hear: “Well, we shouldn’t say that online community is worse or online relationships are worse, because there are people from marginalized backgrounds who are actually really finding community and friendship online.” And I 100% believe that’s true. But what’s notable is that we are talking to guys who elite liberals would call “marginalized” and none of these guys are saying, “I found my home through online communities.”

Soren: Yeah, I think there’s a lot to it, and I think it does add something. Jorge is one of the shining examples there. It obviously is more than zero, right? It’s not a completely absent relationship, even with the people who haven’t ever met friends they’ve made online. But even the folks who had them would be the first ones to tell you that it wasn’t enough. It was something, but it didn’t provide everything that they wanted. And so that’s probably one of the questions I’m most conflicted about: What do you do about those online relationships? It’s clearly better than nothing, but it’s not enough. So how do you wrap your head around it?

Sam: It seems like there’s a “yes, and” approach where we shouldn’t say those online relationships are normatively bad. And to your point, it’s not enough. And so what are the pathways to encourage online-to-in-person relationship building? Which, when we layer on the class angle, is much more difficult because people say they don’t have the time or money. And if you’re spread across the country, I don’t know how you’re doing that translation. So what that then leads you to — particularly with the class angle — is a fallback into in-person connection and contribution, being part of something bigger than yourself in the real world. By the way, this is what the majority of the guys we talked to want.

Soren: Would you say that was the thing that was most surprising for you? Especially having done this study with Dan Cox a few years ago — you had a lot of assumptions about how this would go and what you would hear. What stood out to you?

Sam: So I’ll say two things. There’s a hopeful standout, and then a pretty despairing one. The bright spot, to me, is family. The role that family played in these guys’ lives, and the degree to which these guys, for the most part, were glowing in how they thought about fatherhood. Particularly, the purpose that came through fatherhood, or through being uncles — being there in their nephews’ and nieces’ lives. The purpose that came from that, and the real reciprocal and mutual sense of needing and feeling needed by family — that was beautiful. And what gives me hope in that is, frankly, my belief that family is one of the foundational pillars of civil society and associational life. And what that tells me is that this core pillar — as religious participation, community participation, unions, and neighborhood membership have all declined — is still there for a lot of people. And that’s a foundation from which we can build.

The despairing piece for me was the shadow of addiction, the shadow of deaths of despair, the shadow of loss. It wasn’t the majority of the men we talked to, but there was a significant enough subset of guys who lost multiple best friends to suicide or drug overdoses, who lost friends to prison, who lost friends to murder. And those guys were feeling a real, grounded sense of hurt and pain. It seemed that they’d been hurt so much that the openness or willingness to make themselves vulnerable, to build new friendships, just didn’t make sense. We talked to this guy, Douglas, who had incredibly tragic losses in his life — his two closest friends. And he spoke beautifully around the potential of friendship as something akin to blood and family. He basically said, “I’ve just been hurt too bad. I don’t know if it’s worth getting hurt that way again.” His story was maybe more intense than others, but we heard that time and again. Maybe it wasn’t loss from death, tragic death, but it was from betrayal, from getting used, from getting let down. And the guys who felt like they got burned don’t want to get burned again. And that, to me, is pretty despairing.

It reminded me a lot of what I saw in terms of the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve both seen what happens in the wreckage of policy decisions that were made 20 years ago, and how future generations have to deal with that wreckage. And I saw that in these conversations, particularly around the opioid epidemic and deaths of despair.

Soren: Yeah, totally agree.

Sam: Let me ask you that question. There’s a whole interesting thread for us, which is we both have a connection to the military and veteran experience — you obviously serving in the military, me pretending like I served in the military (but, actually, building a veterans nonprofit and leading that for seven years). Did you see any parallels in the research and the interviews between your experiences either in the military or now with friends who are veterans, and the guys that we talked to?

Soren: Yeah, I saw a lot of similarities there. When you make decisions that affect 300 to 400 million people, you have wild reverberations that last a very, very long time and have externalities that you just don’t expect. A lot of veterans, I think, feel their pain comes from this feeling of alienation. And even if they do have a robust relational life, even if they aren’t physically or emotionally alienated from the people immediately around them, they feel very alienated from society. They feel very different. They feel like nobody really understands their pain. And that ends up becoming a source of great strife, I think, for a lot of veterans. Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe — which I know you’ve read too — talks about this deeply, through his own battle with PTSD. But it’s this feeling of alienation from the society around you that just doesn’t understand what you went through, and then you end up feeling very alone and forgotten.

That feeling came across a lot with these guys. They were going through these issues that they knew were not unique, necessarily. They knew they weren’t the only guys who felt this way in the world, but they felt very forgotten, and they felt very alienated and left alone from the people around them. But I left this out of what I was surprised about before. I expected them to go back and blame those structural issues and those policy failures, whatever it might be, and they just did not. They refused to, even when they absolutely should have brought up how they were failed, or how there were forces working against them. When you’re working 80 hours a week and you can barely afford rent, obviously there are structural issues affecting your life, but it just didn’t come up hardly at all.

Sam: So, we’re now going to speculation here, but that, for me, is different than the veteran community. Because the veteran community has this feeling that society — and I’m speaking in generalities — owes a burden or responsibility of care to them. Obviously, that’s manifested through the VA as an example. But when veterans face issues, oftentimes they blame the government and the VA for those issues, at times when it’s not even the VA or the government’s fault. And so I’m curious how you think about the distinctions there. These guys, in our perspective, should be placing the blame on structures, on systems, and aren’t. What’s your hunch on what to attribute that to?

Soren: Yeah, I think one of the weird experiences of serving and then coming home is you get thanked endlessly at the halftime of every NFL game and all these commercials and politicians and this and that. I’m being a little facetious here. Obviously, a lot of the thanks is very sincere and genuine, and I took a lot of very long flights and owe a lot to random grandmas at USOs across the country that baked some cookies that morning and left them out. So there’s a lot to be very thankful for. But you are thanked endlessly by society. And so there’s this discrepancy in a lot of veterans’ minds between that public appreciation and the material help they actually receive when they get home. And so they feel owed something they’re not getting.

Then when you talk to these guys, they don’t feel like they’re owed anything. No one has thanked them for anything. They don’t feel like they’ve done anything that deserves that type of help, which in many cases was just, frankly, not true. But they feel like they are in a very thankless role in society. And so because of that, why do they deserve help? The structures shouldn’t be built for them. And so it’s all up to them to fix the problem. But working-class America is obviously the backbone of everything, so they’re doing quite a lot that deserves our thanks.

Sam: We didn’t write about this explicitly in the report, but the thing that I’ve been circling around is the role that therapy culture has played in all this. A lot of these guys were in therapy or had been in therapy, which is surprising — not even for class reasons, but because therapy is so often described as inaccessible. And my perspective is it seems like some people have been in bad therapy. It feels like the guys we interviewed have bought into this idea that they need to fix themselves in order to be in relationship with other people. And that is just so wildly disconnected from how relationships actually work. You build your confidence and self-esteem in relationships, not apart from them. You build your relational skills in the container of community and relationships, not apart from them. But there was this idea that, “I’m going to self-help fix myself, and then I’ll be ready to return to community.” That felt like a quite pernicious turn. These guys felt like there was something they could be better at, and then at that point they would be ready and worthy to be in relationship with other human beings.

Soren: Yeah, that’s a really interesting thread to pull on. And this is actually where I expected more of the digital media diet to play in. I have watched a lot of this stuff for my previous work, and a lot of it is just telling guys that to be a successful man, you need to make a bunch of money and sleep with a bunch of women and be powerful in some sort of way. And if you don’t have all three of those things, then you failed in some sort of way spiritually as a man. So they feel like, “Well, I might not be any of those things. I need to fix myself before I am worth anything to society,” which is just not the case at all. And then maybe some of them go to therapy to try to figure out a way to reach those points. And one, you’re just going in the wrong direction. That is not the stuff to work on. But two, as you said, I agree — you can’t fix yourself alone. You need a bunch of people to help you do that. That’s the whole point of relationships — to have that sort of social mutual aid between people.

But I will say, a lot of the guys were in therapy and talked really encouragingly about it. They said it was very helpful to them, which was good. Especially if you think about the idea of being sold this bad bill of masculinity when they were younger, about not talking about their feelings and just shoving it all down inside, and this weird, perverse stoicism that has kind of swept the nation. Therapy has been a way for them to move past that and get more in touch with their emotions, which is great. But it’s not everything.

Sam: Yeah. I think that’s a good correction. It felt like it should be one of a multitude of things. So much of the emotional openness we were speaking to, and the rejection of the hyper-masculine, stoic approach, emerged through guys who had been through therapy and were processing things they were letting go of. For the most part, that was good. The problem was that it was the only thing, and that was what stood between them and being involved in other things. And I think both of those things could be true at the same time.

I kind of want to switch gears here, if it’s cool. I know we’re coming to the end. We’ve been talking about some heavy stuff. There was a lot of heavy stuff in this. But I also know that, in my experience just talking to dudes, there’s some funny shit that comes up. And I’m curious if there was anything in particular that stands out as a really funny thing that someone said in the interview process.

Soren: Yeah, there were two. One was funny just because of how it reflected on me. The other one was funny just for what they said. There’s one guy, Beto, who had a wife and a newborn daughter. And the way that he talked about them, it was just unbound love for these two people in his life. He loved his wife dearly. He was smitten by this infant child that he just had. He could have gone on for an hour about how much he loved them. And I forgot how it came up, but we were talking about successes or something, and he goes, “Yeah, well, growing up when I was younger, I always wanted a hot goth girlfriend. And if you look at me now, I got it.” And he was so proud of himself for doing it. I was like, “Fuck yeah, brother, live your true self.”

Sam: That would have been the one I chose to

Soren: Then there was another one where I was talking to a guy, and up front I asked, “What do you do? What are your hobbies?” I play chess now; that’s my main hobby. And I said, “What are your hobbies?” And he said that he fixes old chainsaws, which was an incredibly masculine hobby, and emasculated me immediately at the top of the interview, and I found it hard to come back from.

Sam: He just goes: “Chainsaws.” Yeah, that was really fun to read. The only other thing I’ll say is there was an exchange in one of our later interviews with Hector. You asked him about who his role model was, and he just, without a hesitation, said “Boromir.” I know you’re a big Lord of the Rings guy, so you guys just had this great completely-unrelated-to-the-interview-process riff on how Boromir is misunderstood. And I just thought that was heartwarming to read, but it was also just a pretty funny few pages of interview transcripts all about Boromir.

Soren: That one really took a turn, and I do feel very strongly about that. He’s a great man. He was served a bad bill. He’s a great icon of masculinity as somebody who failed but then made up for it and admitted his failures and went out a hero.

Sam: Well, now that people have heard about why they should reconsider Boromir’s role in the trilogy, what I wanted to end with is where you and I started. There are many areas of overlap that we have, but one of them, I think, is a shared disillusionment with purely quantitative ways of knowing. I know you and I have been trying to push this book, We Built Reality, by Jason Blakely. We read it, share it with everyone, and no one else reads it. But we love it. So I think the question I want to get us towards ending with is: what’s at the heart of this disillusionment for you? I’m curious how this experience with this project shaped your perspective around that, if at all.

Soren: Yeah, I do feel very strongly about that, and you should read that book if you’re listening. Before all this, years ago, I was an interrogator in the Army for Special Operations. But there’s a big struggle in the intel world, not just ours but broadly, about this idea of, “Oh well, everything’s online and digital now, so that’s the way you can collect all this intelligence.” And the fight between quantitative and qualitative actually started there for me, about 15 years ago. Sure, you can hear somebody’s day-to-day conversations if you want, but you only learn so much from just hearing them talk. There is no substitution for speaking to them and asking questions. And you learn there’s this depth of knowledge and information and texture and color that you get from a long one-on-one conversation with somebody that you just cannot get through surveys or polling. It just doesn’t come across. Now, those things serve a purpose. They’re a very fast and relatively cheap way to get that information, but they don’t bring you everything. And when you’re trying to study really thick, thorny, hard-to-wrangle social questions like this, or in politics especially, surveys are just very shallow. The world has changed so much over the last 20 years, and to think that we’d be able to answer really profound questions about what people are thinking, what’s in their mind, how they feel, through impersonal surveys — it’s just not there. We’ve really committed to worshipping at the shrine of the linear regression as this crystal ball that will tell us what’s going on, but it only does so much. And I think we should really look at returning to some older ways of getting this information.

Sam: I think what we said at the outset is that the experience of isolation and disconnection can make you functionally invisible to the outside world. Because your relationships are what make you visible — you are seen by another human being — what we wanted to do was make the invisible visible. And we wanted to take guys who were often talked about but weren’t often heard from directly, and hear from them to humanize their lives, provide texture to their lives, and do so in a way that got into the complexity, the messiness, the confusion of it all. This project emerged from that 2024 survey report that I thought was useful information: It was able to show in pretty clear detail what this class divide looked like overall. But then to be able to go and get into the thorny messiness of it with people, with these guys who were again willing to share some of the most intimate details of their lives — I just feel a sense of responsibility to hold these stories and make sure that they are stewarded as effectively as they can be. I also feel a great sense of richness and of understanding that we’ve even hit on throughout this conversation. What the experience of men without degrees, and the threads of that experience that were consistent look like. We would not have been able to get into it had we relied on just top-line survey questions.

Soren: One of the best examples of this was the gap between the amount of guys who said that they had close friends versus the amount that said they had them once we started doing the interviews. The definition of close friends, when you’re answering a survey, might be there in a single line, or might not be there at all. There’s a ton of qualification that they need to provide for that answer. And then when they get in front of somebody who defines what a close friend is and digs in, it came out that for a lot of the guys that were in that data set who answered “yes” on the survey to having multiple close friends, when I talked to them, it was one, maybe two, people that they had met online, that they had never met in person, and talked to about once a month. I believe that friendship meant a lot to that person, but I would not consider that a close friend. And that’s very hard to come across in a survey, and you would never have learned that without going and talking to those folks. So it’s a “yes, and” to use your line.

Sam: Well. Soren, this project started based on a close friendship, and at the tail end of it, it hasn’t yet wrecked a close friendship. And I’m grateful to do this with you.

Soren: Yeah, me as well. It’s been a really interesting journey.

Left Alone

This project emerged from a close friendship. Soren served for nine years in human intelligence collection roles for U.S. Special Operations. Sam founded and led the Armed Services Arts Partnership, where he spent seven years helping veterans and their families reconnect with a sense of camaraderie and purpose in civilian life. We met during a period of transition for us both, connecting around a shared commitment to making inappropriate jokes, and a shared disillusionment with the shallow public discourse around class, gender, and community. In the years since, Soren began building new strategies for large-scale digital strategic communications, and Sam began researching and writing on the intersection of civic life, social connection, and class.

In 2024, Sam teamed up with the Survey Center on American Life to design and publish the “Disconnected” survey report, which showed the extent to which the college degree has become the dividing line in American civic life. We found that, compared to college grads, Americans without degrees are significantly less likely to participate in religious and community groups, and they have far fewer close friends and people to turn to for social support. What we didn’t find was evidence of the so-called “male loneliness” crisis; education was the dividing line in Americans’ relational lives, not gender.

But there was still an education and gender story hidden in the data. For the past several decades, even as overall college completion rates have increased for women and men, women have been enrolling in and completing college at significantly higher rates than men. Men today make up just over 40 percent of those who enroll in and complete four-year colleges, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1970. More Americans, especially more women, are graduating from four-year colleges, but a growing proportion of the Americans who aren’t graduating are men. So as the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life, men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.

This education and gender story did show up in the qualitative interviews we conducted as part of that same “Disconnected” project. Of the 20 survey respondents we spoke to — women and men, with degrees and without degrees — it was the three men without degrees we interviewed who stood out for being completely untethered. The experiences of isolation these men shared were vulnerable, raw, and, at times, heartbreaking. But their textured, human stories were hidden behind sterile data points that ultimately became fodder for op-eds in major outlets and hot takes on Twitter.

Sam and Soren shared their disillusionment over months of group texts. As we saw it, there was no “male loneliness” crisis, but a crisis of men without degrees being “left alone” by society. The struggles of these men were being instrumentalized for clicks and engagement, and the richness and particularity of their stories were being flattened into lifeless and abstract data points. People were misunderstanding the data, and the data was leading to misunderstanding.

Nobody to Call

The nature of disconnection is that your life — with all its messy experiences and stories, all its emotions and feelings, all its struggles and aspirations — is mostly invisible to the outside world. We decided to embark on this research project, Nobody to Call, to make the invisible visible: to humanize and provide texture to the lives of a group of people who are often talked about but are rarely heard from directly.

Our approach for doing this was simple: talk to guys about their relationships. We conducted one-on-one virtual interviews with 30 American men, all of whom ranged in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties, and none of whom had college degrees. Our interviews lasted 30 to 45 minutes, and during each interview, we asked the same questions about friendship, community, role models, and purpose. While we make no claims about generalizability, we believe the men we interviewed are largely representative of men without degrees in their age range. What follows is the prevailing storyline we heard across our interviews.

Most of the men are almost completely disconnected. Many have no close friends, no connection to the community, and no mentors or role models. It’s not just one thing that’s missing for living a flourishing, connected life; it’s often almost everything: friends, mentors, neighbors, community, and weak ties. As Josiah, a 40-year-old from South Carolina, succinctly shared: “Except for my family, I don’t regularly do anything with anybody.”

The disconnection experienced by many of these men emerged over time through a process of slow drifting away. This slow “drift” often started when they graduated high school, and continued throughout adulthood. For many, the loss of the consistent structure of school — coupled with the lack of a new structure like college, the military, or stable work — contributed to the atrophying of their relationships over time. Silvio, a 28-year-old from Washington, pointedly described the friendship cliff he experienced after graduating high school:

“When I was in high school, I had friends that I would see on a regular basis. I had classes with them, I’d see them at lunch … You keep these people at a distance for a reason, because you know you may never see them again after senior year and you graduate. And that’s true for probably 99% of them. I don’t know where they’ve gone off to, and I don’t necessarily care one way or the other … I might have made close friends if I’d gone off some place else, but I haven’t left where I am. I’m still here...”

Even where connections do exist, they are often tenuous ties — one friend, one mentor, one group — which creates a single point of failure for their relational lives. For these men, new relationships are hard to make, existing ones are easy to break, and common life changes, like a move or a new job, often make the difference between living somewhat connected lives or living in isolation. Jordan, a 43-year-old from Tennessee, reflected on how one friend moving left him friendless and alone:

“We lost touch, and we weren’t hanging out. Then he moved to Seattle, and with the time difference, it became a lot more difficult to hang out — even just talking on the phone. It’s not like we could just say, ‘Hey, let’s go see a movie or let’s do something this weekend.’ They’re in Seattle, I’m in Tennessee, so you just lose touch. I don’t think I’ve talked to him in probably a year and a half … I feel lonely. I feel like I don’t have connections, and on a broader scope … I don’t have anybody that I feel like I matter to.”

But most of these men haven’t closed up or given up. They’re yearning for connection and they’re yearning to contribute to something bigger than themselves. Most men actively want to make more friends, to get more involved in their communities, and to experience more purpose in life. Notably, they see this purpose as something that can only be realized relationally — as fathers, uncles, mentors, and community members. As Cedric, a 31-year-old single father from Texas, put it:

“I think my purpose is not only to give back to my own kids, but to youth in general … That’s how I look at all of that stuff [I went through] — so that I would be able to turn around and do the same for somebody else, and hopefully, save them the way the YMCA saved me … for people that their father wasn’t in the home, they need a positive role model — somebody to look up to.”

Still, the gap between the men’s expressed desire for connection and their ability to fulfill this desire often seemed too big to bridge. Most of these men struggle to identify where to begin to connect with friends and community, and they often confront material barriers (e.g., money, time) to building and sustaining relationships. Yet, they often blame themselves for having neither the confidence nor the skills to be more connected, and they feel it’s their responsibility to “fix” themselves before building new relationships. Deion, a 29-year-old from Ohio, exemplifies the social stuckness that so many of the men we interviewed feel:

“Part of it is social anxiety … I just don’t know how to interact properly … I hate to admit it, but I’ve always been kind of shy and to myself … Now that I’m getting older, connection is a big thing, so I’ve been trying to do that more. But again, I suck at it. I’ve been going to therapy, trying to figure it out, trying to put myself out there more — little by little — so I can gain certain skills. Because I think it’s very important — connection and community. So I be trying to work on that, with a little progress, but not much.”

Calling In

We spent a lot of time debating whether we should close our report on a hopeful note. Ultimately, we landed on no.

For most of the men we interviewed, the gap between their yearning for connection and their capabilities to realize it seemed too big to bridge. That’s because most of these men weren’t just lacking one relationship — be it with a friend, a mentor, a neighbor, a community group, or a house of worship — they were often lacking almost every relationship. Ten to twenty years after leaving high school, most of the men we spoke to found themselves either completely disconnected, or one tenuous tie away from complete disconnection.

We, as a society, have let these men down.

We’ve built a meritocratic system of higher education that has made the four-year degree the cost of entry to living a good life in community. We’ve built a financialized economic system that has undermined the very foundations of working-class life. We’ve built a culture that prizes a form of hyperindividualistic, consumerized choice at the expense of the commitments, communities, and connections that have historically bound us together. There can be no silver bullet or quick fix for this interlocking and compounding process of social disintegration that has been several generations in the making.

The dark irony is that most of these men saw it as their personal responsibility to rebuild their relational lives from scratch. But relationship-formation doesn’t work this way, and never has. Historically, relationships and community have been more the gifts of generational inheritance than the prizes of entrepreneurship. We inherit many overlapping webs of association, which, sustained by tradition, obligation, and necessity, follow us throughout our lives. The relationships we form through these shared associations — family, religion, community, place, or otherwise — beget new relationships and new associations. Contrary to the self-help ethos that pervades our society, relationships and community have never been solely individual choices to make nor individual responsibilities to develop.

But just as we, as a society, have let these men down, we also have an opportunity to lift these men up.

Policy can and should play a role here. We need programs like state service years and cohort-based vocational training to create accessible, structured pathways for relationship-building during the adult transition. We need policies like fair workweeks, living wages, worker boards, paid family leave, and an expanded child tax credit to strengthen the material foundations of working-class life. Policies like these are important, but policy alone is not enough.

If the challenges these men face are relational, our collective action must begin relationally. Families, the one form of connection most of these men still have, can see it as their responsibility to get their isolated sons, brothers, fathers, and uncles more connected with friends and community. Religious and community groups should support the efforts of these families so they’re not shouldering this responsibility on their own. And these same groups should make dedicated efforts to intentionally invite disconnected men to participate and belong — just as the YMCA did 175 years ago.

The good news from our interviews is that many men without degrees will be receptive to this kind of outreach. The current cultural narrative about these men — that they are nihilistic, resentful, closed-up loners — is almost entirely wrong. Most of these guys want to open up, connect, and contribute, but they need to be called in. As Deion shared:

“I’m just trying to figure out something I want to do in my life that’s gonna change the world — or the community — in a positive light. Now I’m just looking for purpose, something bigger than me, something where I can make the change in someone’s life or my life. I’m just here, just passing by — and that doesn’t sit well with me.”

Will we answer the call, or continue to leave them alone?

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*Note: The illustrations used throughout this project were hand-drawn by EJ Baker. They are not literal portraits of the men we spoke to, but rather represent them in age and ethnicity. This approach allowed us to further humanize these men without compromising their anonymity.

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I’ve known and looked up to Phil since I was a schmucky 23-year-old getting the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP) off the ground, and he was a recent National Book Award-winner who would make the time to get coffee with me when I visited New York City. It was Phil’s writing (and ’s) that helped me make sense of the complicated, profoundly moral experience of leading ASAP, and the significant distance between the military and the American public that often shields civilians from confronting war’s moral consequences.

So, when the war in Iran started, I knew I wanted to have a conversation for Connective Tissue — not about the war itself, but about the distance between the military and the American public that has enabled our 21st century conflicts, and about war’s profound moral and human consequences. Phil was the person I wanted to have this conversation with, and I was grateful that he agreed to speak with me and our mutual friend (and resident philosopher), Ian Marcus Corbin.

Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be an exceptional, powerful, and challenging discussion. I hope you consider giving it a full read. And, if this is the first time you’re encountering Phil’s work and want to go deeper, I encourage you to read Redeployment, Missionaries, Uncertain Ground, and his recent public writing. Semper tissue.

- Sam

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Sam: I was trying to figure out where to start this, and I ended up going back to the “Citizen-Soldier” piece that you first published for Brookings in 2016. You wrote, “Joining the military is an act of faith in one’s country—an act of faith that the country will use your life well.” I remember loving that line when I read it in 2016, and when I read it again, it felt like it captured a lot of the commitments that underpin your writing: service and citizenship, obligation and responsibility, faith and morality. But I’m curious to hear, in your own words, how you would describe the experiences and influences that have formed you and that animate your work.

I retain an idealistic patriotism. It’s difficult to say that line without it being tinged by a certain amount of grief because the country has not used the lives of its service members well. And this is not just about what happens to the service members, but the global consequences of the irresponsible use of military force.

I joined the military as a young man, in some ways convinced by the humanitarian argument for Iraq. Here is this brutal dictator who has no just authority over his own country. Therefore, what is the worst that can happen if we invade? Iraq is not headed on a good trajectory. It is a source of instability in the region. And the continuance of Saddam’s regime means only more suffering for the Iraqi people. Since the status quo was so bad, if we rolled the iron dice of war, I thought the chances of the situation ending up much better were pretty good.

And then, God, in December 2019, I’m in Sinjar speaking with a woman. Her family was murdered in the Yazidi genocide. Then she was captured and taken as a slave by ISIS. She was ultimately rescued, but her sister was still in the Al-Hol refugee camp — still in captivity. And the guy who was running this Yazidi smuggling operation is asking us, “Why can’t we get any attention? We still have so many people who are trapped.”

How bad can it get? The issue with war is there is really no bottom to how bad it can get. There’s people I know who were sent to failed wars — and Afghanistan is the most stark example of that. Then there are broader consequences for the regions where we’re engaged in combat and where we have expended military power without a thought.

So there’s this idealistic notion I have about service that I still hold to dearly, and then there’s the more difficult question of whether America has proven itself worthy of that faith. Would I tell a parent whose child is signing up for the military today that the current administration will only engage in military operations if they have seriously thought through all the consequences, and that there will be a robust congressional oversight that will ensure that our war plans are moral and achievable? No. Neither of those things apply, and that’s a tragic situation to be in.

Ian: You opened by saying you retain some sort of patriotism. There’s loving the people around you — maybe there’s loving or thinking highly of your fellow service members. But what does it mean to be patriotic in this moment? It can’t just be loving the aggregate of people around you, can it? Doesn’t there also have to be some guiding conception of what the country could be?

That is the question. I always come back to Lincoln’s notion of a nation that is conceived with the idea that men are born free and dedicated to equality. The imperfectness of that is obviously baked in from the beginning, but it’s a desire to have a robust, pluralistic nation that holds those core principles at its heart. I don’t think that the current state of affairs, at any point in history, is a reason to turn one’s back on that project. The most difficult periods of American history are precisely those moments when it is more important that we dedicate ourselves to those propositions.

In a weird way, what you have with the current administration is a repudiation of the principles of America precisely because they failed. This is when you have JD Vance talking about how people don’t fight for abstractions. Obviously people do fight for abstractions. But for him, in the wake of the failures of wars started with high rhetoric about democracy, the response to that is to retreat to a narrow nationalism rooted in soil and land and people. I am not unmoved by the invocation of a concrete attachment to your community that Vance talks about when he talks about the graveyard where generations of his family are buried. But I’m also a New Yorker, so when people talk about their attachment to a community, the thing that is the traditional New York is not a static place, but one marked by immigration and change.

There’s a conception of American identity that is baked in from the beginning, which is all about turbulence and mixing and pluralism and change. One of the things that anchors that is a set of abstractions and idealistic commitments. This stripped down notion that “American idealism didn’t work out very well, so let’s chuck it to the side and be hard-headedly realist” — that gives up a core traditional conception of what it is to be an American in the first place.

Ian: There’s a way to do multiculturalism that a lot of European countries are deciding right now has not worked. This is where, in the suburbs of London, you have neighborhoods where everyone speaks a language other than English. I think they’re deciding that what has come of that form of Englishness is social dislocation, culture war, and the body politic not being anything in particular, but just being a collection of very different things. Does it work differently in America? Is there something about the New York City model that isn’t just like, “Oh, look, there are the Algerians, there are the Vietnamese,” but that somehow brings a unitedness?

This is our tradition. There’s a famous quote in “Letters from an American Farmer” from John de Crèvecœur in 1782:

What then is the American, this new man? He’s either a European, or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a man, a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he’s embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great alma mater.

Already in the 18th century, the defining feature of Americanness is a certain degree of mixture defined by immigrants. Then there’s the question of “What all ties that together?” There are a variety of things. Some that conservatives talk about — community and history and tradition — I’m very attached to. But the founding principles become and remain a really important glue.

Sam: One of JD Vance’s other core justifications for being “more of an American” is the fact that his ancestors — and communities like the one he came from — are the ones that have borne more of the brunt of the wars that have been fought. And I do read your writing over the past 15 years as calling attention to this very distance between the people who fight our wars and the rest of us. So what do you see as the primary causes of this distance between the military and American civilians? How have they accelerated over time?

There’s always been a kind of distance between the American public and the people who fight the wars because war is such an extreme and intense experience. This is as old as war literature: Odysseus coming back to Ithaca and only being recognized by his dog. It’s a foundational experience that sometimes causes people to re-evaluate themselves and their relationship to the polity that sent them abroad. There’s an aspect that is natural and not really possible to do away with.

But something does feel distinct in this current era. Partly that’s to do with the fact that we’re fighting with an All-Volunteer Force, so you have this distance that arises simply because the only people who are going into wars are people who signed up to go in the first place. It’s a relatively small portion of the population, too. It’s not like Vietnam, where there’s a draft, or World War Two, where there’s a draft and the whole nation feels mobilized. Instead, it’s very possible to tune the wars out.

Sam: The end of conscription and the creation of a professionalized, all-volunteer military always struck me as the biggest driver of this distance.

Yes, but there have also been a series of political decisions that have dovetailed with technological advances.

When we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress voted on that decision, and created an authorization for the use of military force. Eventually, the American public started to really sour on the wars overseas, and Obama got elected, in part, on his opposition to the Iraq War. He pulls troops out of Iraq in 2011, but then you have this increasing violence in Iraq and the rise of ISIS. So, a schizophrenic mood starts to develop among the American public: When they see a group like ISIS rising, they want it defeated, but they also don’t want to be at war forever.

That’s when the Obama Administration starts ramping up military aid, and they start sending a lot of special operations troops overseas. All the while, however, they’re arguing that this is not a re-entry into the war because they “ended” the war with fanfare. They’re giving press conferences where they say they’re not putting boots on the ground, they’re just putting in “advisors” in a supervise, train, and assist role. But then, a Pentagon press person is awkwardly dancing around the fact that we’re sending troops to war by admitting well yes, they might end up in “combat situations.”

The politicians are asking us to not consider it a war, and Congress is allowing this to happen without any awkward votes — and part of the reason it’s possible is because we have tools at our disposal that don’t require large troop deployments like we had in 2007, when I was there. We’re using drones. We’re using airstrikes. We’re using special operations troops or special forces as well. These are elite soldiers who are more separate from the American body politic. This is not the 18-year-old kid who signs up for a couple years and then goes to college. A lot of them tend to be older — they tend to be career guys. One told a buddy of mine, Jacob Siegel, that their job was to be like the French Foreign Legion, where nobody back home cares so much if they die. As he writes, “Their purpose is to be no one’s sons or daughters.” So you have the tools of American warfare being used in a way that is designed not to attract much attention, and the administration is actively telling the American public not to pay that much attention to it. We use lethal force, but it feels like a small commitment — one that need not be a matter of American domestic politics.

We’ve been here before, though. In 1962, David Halberstam was embedded with special forces in Vietnam — well before Vietnam becomes Vietnam. He’s writing about how the soldiers in this conflict conceptualize their mission: “With engagement in a private war comes a certain sense of isolation, a feeling that while it is their war, it is not really their country’s war. They find their fellow Americans ignorant of what is going on here — worse, perhaps, indifferent — and it continues to disturb them that no one seems to know where Vietnam is.” And then he writes, “It will almost certainly never reach the harsh sense of alienation that came to haunt the French army and the French people during the time of their struggles with Indo-China’s insurgent populace.”

Because, well, it’s just a little engagement, mostly done with special forces, and yeah, it’s weird, but maybe this is just part of being a professional military? But small private wars have a way of becoming big public wars.

Sam: Can you say more on what you see as the human, relational, and communal consequences of this distance?

You sign up for whatever reason you sign up, but, ultimately, you’re representing the country. In a democracy, there should be a feeling of direct linkage between the will of the American people and what you’re doing, engaging in warfare, which is the most morally consequential thing that a democracy can do. So, to come back from a theater of war — where you have possibly lost friends and put your body at risk and been exposed to horrific things — and to find not even hostility to what you’ve been doing, but indifference and ignorance of it, that feels like a particular kind of betrayal. It’s a severing of the contract between the citizen and the soldier. If joining the military is an act of faith that the country will use your life well, it’s deeply disturbing to then find that they didn’t think much of anything at all about how they were using your life, and that you ended up in what Halberstam calls a “private war.”

Sam: If war is the most morally consequential thing a democracy can do, what do you see as the moral obligations of civilians (and their elected leaders) to the military and veterans, both living and dead?

There’s an immediate need to restructure how we approach war so that it returns to more democratic control. We’re in a very dangerous situation right now. After the Venezuela raid, I wrote a piece where I basically said, “As long as we have an unrestrained Executive in this way, presidents are just going to keep rolling the dice until we end up in something that’s an unmistakable disaster, rather than merely something that might have negative consequences over the course of years.” Returning to a system in which there’s much more public debate and restraint around warfare is important for tightening that connection between the will of the populace and the things that we ask Soldiers and Marines to do.

That’s not simply a moral question, it’s also a strategic question. One of the first things Sun Tzu talks about is the “moral law”: If you’re going to go to war, make sure the population is behind you. You articulate a strong moral and practical case for war because you need to marshal the population to be ready to apply the kind of resources necessary to achieve a just outcome.

Then there’s the question of, “How do you respond to the Soldier?” I don’t think you can do much better than Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: caring for the widow and the orphan and the wounded — “those who borne the battle.” As for what we owe the dead, I don’t think you can do much better than The Gettysburg Address. It’s not simply about honoring the dead, but being committed to the moral principle for which they give their lives.

Ian: As war has become more distant — as it’s become less and less likely that people in power will see their own children go off to war — I feel like the language has changed. There’s this strange invocation, which I always find creepy, of, “Do you support the troops?” And everyone scrambles and flaps their arms to say how much they support the troops. It’s not like people are calling service members “Our boys,” like they did in World War Two. What do you think about the symbolic role that the troops play for us in light of this distance between the military and the American public?

There was this mini-controversy recently. Donald Trump showed up at a dignified transfer, and he was wearing a ball cap right as the bodies of these service members who had fallen in the war that he started are being transferred. That is disrespectful. Then they put out a fundraising email with an image of him at the dignified transfer, and it was like, “You donate this much and you get national security briefings,” or something along those lines.

There’s a reality of what those events are supposed to signify. There’s a weight to a dignified transfer, which is particular and devastating if you know the people. Then there’s the imagery around it as a patriotic pastiche: it’s a visual signifier of patriotism, free-floating from genuine concern about a particular individual in a particular family who died for the nation.

There’s a fairly obvious thing: Don’t fundraise off the corpses of Soldiers. But something that seems so fundamental and basic is just not operative. It’s almost like these symbols of American patriotism have gotten detached from anything resembling what those symbols are supposed to connect to, and they just exist as signifiers of greatness and power. It’s a particularly disturbing and degraded shift in our politics.

Sam: To close, I think it’s worth coming back to that line from earlier: “It’s the special forces’ purpose to be no one’s sons or daughters.” Because when I think about this thread of creating solidarity between civilians and their military, there are few things more antithetical to that notion than saying, basically, the only people who are “boots on the ground” are people who are, for lack of better words, “orphans.” That’s a feature and not a bug of our current situation: There’s a deeper kernel of truth in that line that’s been hovering over this entire conversation.

Part of the complication is, in theory, you sign up in a way such that the average American doesn’t have to deal with war. Put it this way: You don’t want to live in a society where there’s no gap between the service member and the society because that is a society engulfed by total war. The whole point of joining is, in a weird way, so that there can be that kind of distance. It’s important for service members to value the weight and seriousness of normal quotidian civilian life.

I always think of that quote from John Adams, where he’s like, “I must study politics and war so my sons have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, and their grandchildren can study poetry.” The whole point of all of this is to enable people to do the arts — not because the arts are frivolous, but because you want normal American citizens living rich, full lives. That’s the whole purpose. The value of society does not lie in acts of violence; it lies in people in peace, pursuing lives of beauty and meaning. That must sometimes be secured by war, but once the war aims are achieved, it must be secured by thoughtful political engagement.

The way that we wage war and conduct our politics are currently off, and that certainly feels like a betrayal to the Soldier. But the end state is not a happy Soldier. The end state is a healthy society, where your grandchildren have a right to study, painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain — none of which will be done by AI.

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I can say a lot more about the conversation — it was wonderful, fun, joyful, bizarre, intense, and intimidating all at the same time. But, for now, I mostly want to express my gratitude to Esther and her team for so graciously inviting me into a dialogue about the many paradoxes of our relational lives. - Sam

Richard Young is the Founder and Executive Director of CivicLex, a Lexington, KY based nonprofit that helps the community get involved in local issues, connect with their neighbors, and have a say in decision making. I’ve come to view Richard as a bit of a unicorn: He’s rooted and committed to the place he’s always called home, and he’s a national voice on civic health, local news, and democracy.

Richard and I first met in 2024, and over the past year and a half, we’ve been collaborating to bring together a network of place-based practitioners to imagine new possibilities for our generational project of civic renewal. The result of that work was the open letter we published last week, along with the party we’re hosting in Denver in April. So, it felt like as good a time as ever to sit down with Richard for a Q&A.

And we actually did sit down together at Kentucky Native, a nursery and cafe in Lexington, where Richard knew no fewer than half of the people in the space. Our conversation covered a lot of ground. What is it, exactly, that CivicLex does, and if it’s so essential, why aren’t there more CivicLex’s out there? We celebrate proximity, relationality, and accountability, but can you be overly proximate, relational, and accountable? And why publish an open letter with other local practitioners when you all have so much going on locally?

This was one of the most fun Q&As I’ve ever done, and I hope you have fun reading it, too. If you want to learn more about CivicLex, check out their website, newsroom, and local newsletter. And if you haven’t yet read our open letter, consider checking it out and signing on.

- Sam

A lot of people know about you and CivicLex outside of Kentucky, which is interesting considering you’re exclusively focused on one place in Kentucky. But you are often on the road spreading the good word about your work in Lexington and the importance of strengthening local civic life. Every other week I talk to you, you seem to be getting a flight. Why do all that?

When we started CivicLex eight years ago, people didn’t really understand us. I remember in our early days we were part of this grant competition where our pitch basically was: “We’re starting this thing called CivicLex. We want to have this website for people to go to learn about local issues and how they can get involved. But we also are going to do all of these in-person events because your ability to influence anything here is based on who you know — if you don’t have the relational connections, it becomes much harder to effectively engage.” These two things — information and relationships — were intrinsically locked together.

Needless to say, we didn’t get the money because the judges didn’t understand what we were doing. They asked things like, “Why would it be important for people to know these people that work in local government?” Even as CivicLex got bigger and more complicated, we kept running into this issue where we were hard to define for people. People also assumed things like us would already exist. I once had the head of a major foundation say to me: “Every community has five organizations like this.” And I had to say, “No, sir. No it doesn’t.”

Then throughout the past eight years, I keep coming back to the same conversations about scale. I would talk to funders and they’d be like, “You need many of these in different communities for the work to really have impact.” But impact doesn’t necessarily just mean reaching a lot of people. Before this, I did community development work at a neighborhood level. I had a constituency of maybe 3,000 people. That work is recognized as high-impact, even though it doesn’t have “scale.” Why wouldn’t that concept translate over to civic spaces?

I was getting frustrated. No one was getting that multiple types of things are needed to make a civic life work, and that the leadership of that work needs to be coming out of a place and accountable to that place. So, in order to have anywhere near successful conversations with funders, I felt I had to shift the conversation as much as I could about why approaching this work relationally at the local level is important.

So, in retrospect, I guess it was mostly spite. Joyful spite.

What you’re getting at is CivicLex does a lot. For the uninitiated or even the initiated who still don’t understand what you’re doing, how would you begin to describe what you guys do here in Lexington? What are the threads that hold it together?

CivicLex does three things: We help people understand and get involved in local issues in our community, we help connect people with their neighbors, and we help change how decisions get made.

We do a couple different things to help people understand and get involved in local issues. We have a foot in journalism through our newsroom, which covers city meetings and other things in civic life. We do civic education for young people, which involves directly teaching in the public school system. We teach thousands of students a year about how local government works and how to advocate for issues they care about. We bring people from community organizations and local government into the public school system to meet students and help build those relationships early. We also do continuing adult education about local civic life. We teach people Advocacy 101: If you care about something in your neighborhood, how do you go about getting it?

We intentionally stimulate relationship building in our community. We host dozens of in-person events every year. We also support places where people already gather: providing grants for neighborhood block parties and newsletters, and investing in local clubs and their capacity to connect people. But the main way people build relationships is by interacting with each other casually over a long period of time, and the place where people often do that is public spaces. So public spaces have become a big focus of our work: namely, bringing the public into decision making around them, and working to both activate and help design them.

The last part of our work is about changing how decisions get made. If we want people to participate in civic life, we have to construct a civic life that wants their participation. This is the newest part of our work, and it came from experiences where we would tell people to get involved, and then they would participate, have a bad time, and not want to do it again.

I distinctly remember getting chewed out in a grocery store by someone who came to a budget workshop and then showed up to a city meeting where the vote on the city budget happened before public comment. They were like, “I did the thing you told me to do. I showed up here to participate in this process, and they voted on it before my turn to speak. I’m not going to do this again.” That’s when we realized that we needed to start looking at how these structures operate, and look at how we could change them. We’ve done this a number of ways: reimagining public meetings, changing our city’s Boards and Commissions, bringing public voice into land use planning, and soon, hosting a Civic Assembly.

I remember reading a piece last year by John Ganz called “Civic Life Kinda Sucks.” It got a lot of traction because he was speaking to the thing you just mentioned: Going to the meetings often does kinda suck. So what does it actually look like to move people toward a better experience around shaping those decisions so you are not getting reamed out in the grocery store?

You have to be okay with just getting reamed out a little bit less every year for a long period of time. Because it takes convincing local decision makers that it is in their interest to change systems, and that’s hard. Change is difficult and uncomfortable, so you have to demonstrate that there’s a value proposition for the decision maker.

You also have to be okay with it taking forever to change, and with any change you succeed in making can be upended immediately. There have been many times when I felt we were making progress on these reforms or changes to systems. Then something happens that’s fully out of our control — this ice storm that we’re experiencing right now in Lexington, for instance — and it moves people so far backwards on the trust meter with local government. Right now, people are pissed off about the city’s response to the ice storm, and it’s going to take a lot of time to convince people to show back up to a process.

But this type of change is still essential to do. For us, what it looks like is developing long-term relationships with people in government. We try to show them that we’re operating with good intentions, experimenting, and seeing what works. And we try to assume the risk, not put the risk burden on local government.

We’re currently working on a civic assembly, which is the biggest version of this we’ve ever done. Importantly, we’re assuming the risk. We approached the government and were like, “This is what we want to do for this thorny problem. We’ll pay for it. We’ll take on the risk. But you have to be open to joining the journey. We’ll give you all the information about how it works and doesn’t work, and you have to be open to the process, respond to the results, and consider using it in the future.”

It seems like you’re keeping local government at arms distance with the civic assembly pilot. What has it looked like to work more directly with government to shape decisions?

The projects where we’ve worked with the local government in genuine partnership have been the most rich and rewarding. We did this project in 2022 around the city’s comprehensive land use plan. Land use is the most contentious political issue in the city — it’s what decides mayoral elections and council elections — because it is about whether our city expands its urban service boundary into farmland. We have big interests on both sides: development interests that want to build, and rural preservationists that want to preserve horse farms.

The typical process for determining this issue involves some town halls in gyms where people get mad, and then the active interests operating behind the scenes. Instead, we designed a process where anyone anywhere in the city could host a conversation about land use. One week, 509 conversations, and 15,000 public comments later, this process produced a different result.

Importantly, this took a two-year process leading up to this one week of actual engagement. We walked alongside government the entire time. We hand-read all 15,000 public comments, built a code book, and hand-coded them. It took two weeks, eight hours a day, 30 people — all my staff, all the Long Range Planning staff — hand-coding every response.

Government representatives came to probably 150 of the 509 conversations. But that’s what it took for a long-term change, because they were in there hearing from people and seeing how this was different. Then they were hand-coding the results and saying, “Wow, these public opinions are nuanced, complex, and thoughtful. These are things that we could work with.” Tangible changes to our city’s 20-year plan came out of that process because they walked with us the whole time. That’s what it takes: two years, long-term relationships, and long-term accountability. It’s not just a program that can be turned on and turned off.

You’re building a mediating layer between residents and local government, which seems like it would be essential in every place. But if it’s so essential, how do you account for the fact that CivicLex seems to be so unique?

People will say things like, “Oh my god, you stumbled onto this interesting thing.” And I’m always thinking, “This just seems like, ‘duh.’ Of course there should be something that acts as a telephone operator between the government and the public.”

What we are, if anything, is an ombudsman. If you want to get involved, we’ll guide you to the right place. I often talk publicly about these big programs and all the things we do. But the reality is that, every week, we get calls from people looking for housing assistance, and we tell them where to go. We’ll get emails from people saying things like, “I can’t get in touch with my council member. What should I do?”

I think our role reflects a failure on many levels. It’s a failure of government. It’s a failure of a market-based media ecosystem that is solely motivated by eyeballs, clicks, and profit. It’s a failure of our society to let civic life hollow out. Yes, we are a honed, purpose-built program to address this hollowing out. But that has only come in response to what we see as observable gaps in our communities.

Kentucky, itself, strikes me as unique. Yes, almost all of my favorite musicians (Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers) and writers (Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton) have called Kentucky home. But more saliently to this conversation, it seems like a lot of creative experimentation has been happening in Kentucky. What do you attribute this to?

Part of it is culture. Kentucky is a highly relational place, and Lexington is a highly relational place. It’s a place where the distance between neighbors and government, between rural and urban counties, isn’t that big. As I learned through my time with the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange, we all depend on each other. We’re stuck with each other — in a good way. You can’t disengage when things get sticky.

I think people are sometimes surprised by the experimentation happening here because of preconceived notions about our state, many of which are driven by national media. I also think that many find the relational nature of the work in places like ours to be confusing. They see relationships as means, not ends in and of themselves.

But some of my favorite examples of civic work happens in places like Kentucky — I’m thinking about Civic Nebraska, or the David Mathews Center in Alabama. That’s because places like ours tend to be scrappy. CivicLex didn’t break a $100,000 budget for its first four years. When you don’t have a lot of resources, you center other things — relationships, responding to your community. If I were a funder, I’d put my money in these kind of scrappy places where we just make things happen.

It seems like people are now awakening to the importance of strengthening civic life in ways that prioritize place, participation, and relationships. I know you get a lot of people who want to translate elements of CivicLex beyond Lexington. What kind of guidance would you give those people to spread some of that CivicLex sauce to their local communities?

Do multiple things at once, which means don’t go super deep on one thing. If you’re starting a project about providing information to people, how can you work on the relational piece and the systems change piece, too? If you’re doing a systems change project, are you also thinking about how people use information and how they build relationships? If you’re working on the relationship piece, that’s great; but how are you enabling people to also advance the things that they care about?

I’m not saying that everyone has to do everything all the time, but I do think we should ask ourselves, “If I’m encouraging people to get involved in a system, is that system well-equipped to receive them? Am I following it all the way down the path?” If not, what are you going to do to prepare the garden bed?

We’re sitting in a plant shop. Durable ecosystems have multiple species. Monocultures aren’t great. But I often feel that the broader civic and democracy renewal space thinks in terms of monocultures. A lot of our interventions into civic life are, “If we plant this one thing, it will fix the ecosystem.” That’s not how ecosystems work, though. You need many things. You have to be planting a garden, not a crop, when you’re trying to renew your place. You can have a small garden or you can have a really big garden. What’s important is to have multiple species — multiple types of civic work overlapping — not just soybeans.

Let’s say I’m just beginning. Maybe I plant a little civic media newsroom to cover town meetings. But should I also be organizing a little microgrant for neighbors to gather?

It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Maybe just have some coffee hours where people can talk to you. Maybe go talk to your local government and say, “I’ve been noticing these things in the meetings that I’ve been attending. I would love to talk with you about what it looks like to build that better. Would you consider coming to this coffee chat that I’m hosting and talking to the people who are talking to me?” It’s a starting point for engaging in information, relationships, and systems-change all at once.

What you’re pointing to is thinking relationally rather than thinking mechanically.

That’s a much better way of saying everything I just said in the past 10 minutes.

It’s a way of acknowledging that all these things are interrelated, rather than, “This is one input that’s going to be designed to create some sort of measurable output.”

It’s acknowledging that our ecosystem is just made up of people that have emotions and feelings and thoughts and cares and dreams and aspirations and failures that they know and understand. And you should just talk with them. That is a very different thing on the local level compared to the national level. I can’t have a personal relationship with Chuck Schumer. I’m not going to have a personal relationship with Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, my two Senators. But I can have a relationship with the person who is in charge of streets and roads. I can go and talk to him and say, “Hey man, my street’s not been plowed.”

Rand Paul — notably someone who has had tough relationships with his neighbors. This, in a weird way, gets me back to a question I’ve had in the back of my mind. We’ve been circling around three related concepts this whole convo: proximity, relationality, and accountability. They also have come up in many of our past conversations, and when we talk about it, I’m often like, “Hell yeah, brother.”

But when I think about the practical implications, being overly proximate, overly relational, and overly accountable feels like it could be overwhelming. It feels like it could be a reason someone wouldn’t want to do the work anymore. Is there a way that you can have proximity and accountability without it completely burning you out?

It’s beautiful and terrible — all at once. The beauty of it is what we just experienced at Kentucky Native. We came to this place and we saw five people I knew inside an hour. When you have that degree of proximity, it creates an undeniable accountability because you cannot escape critique. You cannot escape feedback, and that’s good (I think).

But it also creates a type of pressure: There is a finite amount of time that one can do this work. I can’t do this forever. I’m tired. But I want CivicLex to continue to exist, so it cannot be about me. I have to be thinking in terms of governance structures, revenue structures, etc. for 10 years from now, not this year. I need to build something the next person can pick up. This is where all the principles in the letter come together. Building for long-term accountability means building something that is generational — that you, personally, are not caring for forever.

There’s an irony in people trying to build democratic innovations that are inherently distant and unaccountable. That’s the whole point. The entire purpose of our way of being is the accountability of the governance structure. If you’re doing work in a community that you’re not accountable to, that’s a form of tyranny. Yes, it’s much less serious than actual tyranny, but it’s the soft tyranny of imposing your will onto a place.

Your answer just now reminded me of how distance can be something that you could hide behind. It also creates an easy exit hatch — whether that be exiting a relationship, exiting a commitment, or exiting a place.

If I mess up my work, I can’t live here anymore. And it’s a place I’m from. My parents live here. If I don’t do my work well, my mom will hear about it. That is a unique type of pressure. But in work that is about improving a place, you can’t stop at having professional accountability. You have to have personal accountability, and distance removes that type of accountability.

You just mentioned the letter we’re releasing: “An Invitation to a New Civic Future.” When this Q&A comes out, we’ll have, knock on wood, already published our open letter. Why release an open letter? Why now?

In community development, one of the things you learn is that doing something is not necessarily better than doing nothing. Sometimes an intervention you think is going to make things better is actually harmful.

Things are in such a sorry state right now that there’s an urgency to try to correct them. But, to me, the value of this letter is to provoke that question: Is the thing that we’re doing better than nothing? For the people trying to “save our democracy,” are the things they’re investing in built for long-term, durable change? Is a solution tried and failed better than doing nothing?

I hope that the letter is a bit of a provocation in a friendly way to say, “There is a version of this that works. We’ve seen it work. It’s rooted in the history of our country and our communities, and it’s aligned with how people function in the real world. It may not be visible to everyone, but this is a solution that we think is worth more than doing nothing.”

The future we’re trying to will into being through the letter is one where people feel agency over their lives, where neighbors are connected through relationships of trust, and where communities have the power to shape their own futures. We think we need guiding principles for our interventions, and we suggest five, all of which are rooted in localism.

If you’re in your community, or in a hall of power, and you genuinely care about people having a sense of agency, this will never be able to be done from the top down. It just can’t. It’s too brittle. There is a more durable way to do this, and what we spell out in the letter is a pathway. I’m hopeful that if we illuminate this path, it will at least make enough people curious to check it out and go down the path a little bit. Who knows? They might find a pretty woodland garden at the end of it.

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Can you feel it?

In the face of our country’s many crises, new seeds of civic renewal are beginning to take root. In neighborhoods, parks, libraries, and houses of worship across America, neighbors are cultivating a new civic future and finding new ways to break out of the dominant idea for the past 50 years: that our communities were better managed from afar than built together in the places we call home.

But our communities know better.

While our political parties and institutions crumble under partisanship and ineffectiveness, communities are solving problems for themselves. While distant experts sell us technocratic fixes to community ills, communities are renewing themselves from within. While national headlines tell us we’re lonely, divided, and powerless, communities are showing us something else: a future rooted in the local, neighbor-led civic life that has sustained this nation since its founding.

America is at the start of a generational opportunity to renew our civic life.

Moments like this are fragile. They can be nurtured. Or, they can be captured. Solutions being sold to communities by distant experts, nonprofits, and funders who aren’t accountable to them may not intend harm. But they often shift attention, power, and resources away from communities, displacing local stewardship rather than strengthening it.

It’s this opportunity for community-led renewal — and the risk it gets captured — that’s brought a small group of us together over the past year. We come from different political traditions, geographies, and lines of work, but we are bound by a shared commitment to renewing civic life in the places we live and by a shared belief that this renewal can only be built from the ground up.

As we’ve met, we’ve asked ourselves: What kind of shared civic life are we called to grow together?

Here’s our answer: One where people feel agency over their lives, where neighbors are connected through relationships of trust, and where communities have the power to shape their own future.

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THE FOUNDATIONS OF CIVIC RENEWAL

We believe the seeds of this shared civic life must be rooted in five foundational principles for cultivating our collective future:

Participatory

We must approach residents as active members expected to shape their community’s future, not passive clients to be served.

Too much of civic life treats communities as places to be managed instead of places to belong. Professionals design the programs, boards approve the plans, and residents are left to receive or reject what’s been made for them. People are invited to consume decisions as clients or customers instead of producing their own future.

In our civic future, that story changes. People aren’t passive recipients; they are active members deserving of full participation in our shared lives. In our civic future, communities become the laboratories of democracy: places where neighbors work together to solve problems and make meaning. Nothing is done for communities or to them. It’s done by them.

What does this future look like? Relearning the practices of membership we’ve forgotten: cooperation, shared responsibility, and mutual accountability. Recognizing and supporting the local leaders who already help their communities thrive. Removing the practical barriers — time, transportation, resources — that make participation harder for many people.

Alive

We must embrace the joy, culture, and full humanity that make civic life worth living, not the logic of the machine.

Too much of our civic life has been drained of its humanity, turned into something efficient, procedural, and lifeless. We’re told that it’s serious work that must look serious — that the path to a better community is paved by following best practices in pursuit of quantifiable metrics. Yet our most enduring civic traditions arose because people naturally gather, share meals, laugh, mourn, and celebrate together, not because someone stumbled upon a successful intervention.

In our civic future, joy, creativity, and the human condition are not distractions from civic life — they are its lifeforce! In our civic future, people show up as full, complex human beings and build a civic life that people want to belong to. In our civic future, people actually want to show up — because it’s magnetic, because it’s irresistible.

What does this future look like? It’s one filled with shared meals in kitchens, church basements, and on front porches where people experience laughter and sorrow. Communities gathering at block parties, festivals, and cultural rituals rooted in their histories and traditions. People experiencing a full range of emotions side by side, remembering what it feels like to be fully human.

Proximate

We must root renewal in the people who live in the places they serve, not distant groups and leaders.

Too much of our civic life is built from afar. When civic work is led by those who are neither rooted in nor accountable to the people they serve, people and places become commodified and disposable. Communities and their leaders become abstract anyones and anywheres instead of the storied, rich, and real cultures they are.

In our civic future, renewal is led by people rooted in their particular places. When leaders live in the places they serve, know their neighbors by name, and stay long enough to see the results of their work in the next generation, it brings undeniable accountability. In our civic future, scale isn’t achieved by top-down replication or centralization, but from the bottom-up by millions of rooted leaders cultivating civic life in tens of thousands of particular places.

What does this future look like? People discovering their self-interest, rightly understood, by recognizing their own flourishing is bound up with the flourishing of their neighbors. Distributed networks of local leaders, connected to each other in mutualistic relationship within and across place. Sustainability that doesn’t rely on constant outside funding – where communities have real ownership and can govern themselves.

Relational

We must treat relationships and interpersonal trust as ends in and of themselves, not means toward other ends.

Too much of our civic life has become transactional. We treat relationships as means to other ends: to advance goals, prove outcomes, or get the scale we need for investment. We build fields instead of friendships, host convenings instead of seeking communion. All of this can leave us with an aftertaste of feeling used.

In our civic future, relationships are not a strategy or tactic to advance some “more important” measurable outcome — they are the substance of the work itself. In our civic future, our work is built on a foundation of long-term reciprocity that strengthens both people and places. It is this relational commitment that earns trust that lasts.

What does this future look like? Slowing down to cultivate relationships and community at the speed of trust. Choosing depth over breadth, and saying no to opportunities that would stretch a community too far. Sacrificing our short-term ambitions for something more durable — relationships and trust that can bend without breaking, hold complexity without collapsing, and be carried by many over time.

Generational

We must commit to the work, relationships, and structures that outlast us, not the quick fixes or silver bullets.

Too much of our civic life is built for quick fixes. We chase silver bullets and saviors: the new politician that will heal our divisions, the new technology that will reconnect us, the new program that will finally make things right. But it is these quick fixes that replicate the same managerial, distant, transactional patterns that weakened our civic life in the first place. While the moment may feel urgent, the transformation we need takes time — because trust takes time.

In our civic future, we trade urgency for durability. We work with intention, building structures anchored in loyalty to our communities and adaptability to their changing needs, and cultivating relationships that will outlast any individual or organization. We plant trees we won’t sit under.

What does this future look like? Building systems of accountability that help you stay the course when the work gets hard, and revenue and governance structures that sustain you through it. Embracing experimentation and learning in public, documenting what works and what doesn’t so others can build on your experience. Bringing institutions along, inviting them in to grow and change alongside you.

Civic renewal will never happen over a season, a year, or even a decade; it always has been and will be a project that unfolds over generations.

JOIN US

Our civic life can only be renewed by us choosing to build something that lasts in the places that hold us. This isn’t a call to join an organization or sign up for a program. We’re not trying to sell you some new solution. We’re simply inviting you to sign onto this letter and join us in committing to a new civic future (no title, grant, or organization necessary).

For those working on civic renewal in your own community: We see you, and hope you find something in this letter that speaks to you. Don’t lose faith, and keep cultivating the groups, gatherings, projects, and relationships that make your place better. Add your story to this one. Contribute your lessons learned.

For the millions of Americans yearning for a sense of agency: We invite you to apply these principles in your own life. Take this letter as permission that you don’t need permission anymore. Try something new with your neighbors. Find the thing in your community you want to improve, and work on it.

For national organizations: We invite you to consider how your role can help promote localism as a part of civic renewal. If you can’t complement local work and commit to places for the long haul, consider asking yourself, “Should I really be here?“ If you are going to enter communities, leave these places better than you found them.

For philanthropy: We invite you to take a step back from managing communities, and take a step toward trusting them. Invest in distributed networks that bring together people working in their own places. Build real relationships with people stewarding their particular places, and invest in them for long enough to see what emerges.

Regardless of where you sit, if you see your work in this vision, we invite you to join us by signing onto this letter.

We see signing on to these values as an act of civic aspiration. A way of saying: “The future can be like this.”

But, it can also be seen as an act of civic commitment. A way of saying: “I’ll work to make it so.”

We welcome your commitment to our new civic future.

Sign On

Original Signatories & Authors

Savannah Barrett, Art of the Rural & Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange

Pete Davis, Join or Die

Kate Hanisian, YMCA of Greater Cincinnati

Ash Hanson, Department of Public Transformation

Darryl Holliday, News Futures & Commoner Co

Liz Joyner, The Village Square

Naudy Martinez & Evan Vahouny, Falls Church Forward

Adrian H. Molina & Evan Weissman, Warm Cookies of the Revolution

Sam Pressler, Connective Tissue

Daniel Stid, American Enterprise Institute

Richard Young, CivicLex

Fortunately, I was able to get myself (relatively) together for this Q&A, and it didn’t disappoint. We explored several questions that, themselves, could have made for full conversations. What does a tool for conviviality actually look like in practice? How does someone like L.M. hold the responsibility to bear prophetic witness with the responsibility to build the imagined convivial society? What does the right relationship with our tools look like, such that it can cultivate both independence and interdependence?

This conversation was incisive, expansive, and challenging in all the best ways. Please consider giving the full Q&A a read below. And please do subscribe to The Convivial Society on Substack if you haven’t already. It’s one of the few “must-read” newsletters for me each month, and I imagine it may become a “must-read” for you, too (if it isn’t already).

- Sam

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You chose to name your newsletter The Convivial Society, a phrase from Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. Can you share a bit about why you chose that name, and what Illich imagined a “convivial society” could look like?

The title of the newsletter pays homage to Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, but also more subtly, to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society. The convivial society is something opposed to the technological society. I saw Ellul, from whom I’ve learned a lot, as a strident critic of the way that modern technological society is ordered. Illich, himself, is indebted to Ellul: There is a genealogy of ideas shared from one to the other.

For Illich, conviviality involves “learning to live well together,” and it’s an alternative to the life implied in industrial-scale institutions. It’s worth noting that Ilich uses the terms “tools” and “institutions” interchangeably. Illich defined convivial tools — as opposed to industrial-age institutions — as human-scaled. A convivial society does not ask the human to operate at the scale of the machine, but rather configures human relations to be more hospitable to proper human scale. That can be in terms of scales of speed, scales of size, or scales of power. There are various ways in which we operate at scales that are not conducive to the flourishing of the embodied, fundamentally limited creatures we are.

There’s also a freedom in conviviality for Illich. In his view, in an industrial society, we become slaves of disabling institutions. Illich believed institutions that set out to improve our world, once they pass certain thresholds, become counterproductive, even destructive. They create dependencies rather than empower. Illich wanted us to operate with tools that we could enter into a relation of freedom with; we would not be subservient to the tool, but the tool could serve our own human ends.

The last thing conviviality suggests is the practice of hospitality. It was this simple act of welcoming, of sharing a meal, and of sitting across the table from somebody that became very important for Illich in his later writings.

To make it more concrete, what does it look like when tools and institutions pass the realm of human-scale and become counterproductive to human freedom?

In his early work, Illich sees the professions that gather around counterproductive tools and institutions as disabling. The effect of these professions is not to give us the strength, imagination, or resources to confront the world in networks of interdependence. Sometimes one could read Illich as if he is advocating for rugged individuals who are able to care for themselves and make their own way in the world. But there’s an important passage in Tools for Conviviality — which I don’t know quite by heart — where he says that we ideally achieve autonomy or independence for the sake of mutual interdependence. We learn to rely on each other as parts of communities that have the strength and resources to order their lives according to their values. In these communities, we do not have to cordon off areas of life and hand them over to the offices or auspices of an institution.

One striking example of this, which gives us a sense for how much the world has changed, involves burials. While writing in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Illich talks about how a generation ago, burials were handled within the community. You mourned the deceased in their home. They were buried by their friends. It was an intimate, communal affair. Now this has been handed over to the undertaker: This communal, familial rite that humans have performed for themselves since time immemorial has now become a service rendered at cost by a professional class. Illich sees this sort of pattern as an outcome of the institutions of the industrial-age.

Another example of this is at the beginning of Deschooling Society, where Illich says that for many people, “their ability to learn will be undermined by their association of learning with schooling.” The institution of the school mistakes a process in the administration of a service for the actual outcome. The one thing students learn in school is how to mistake process for an outcome and a diploma for competency. We can see this: Schools became credentialing factories that give us a pass into adult life, rather than places that genuinely educate for freedom and competency. Illich would say you see this because there is no end, just a continual accretion. These days, an MA or more is required for entrance into certain fields. Yet, we know instinctively that what we’re getting is a piece of paper that gives us entry. This escalation is part of the counterproductivity that Illich identifies.

I know you said Illich used “tools” and “institutions” interchangeably, but what you just shared seemed like it had more to do with institutions and professions. What, specifically, does a “tool” against conviviality look like and a “tool” for conviviality look like?

I would point to tools where we outsource: GPS is a good example. It feels like it empowers you, and it gives you this ability to navigate new cities that you may be visiting or your own city. But the cumulative effect is that all of these individual instances of being seemingly empowered — or, of gaining a measure of efficiency in getting from point A to point B — ultimately de-skills the person who finds it almost impossible to operate without that tool.

It’s amusing to me to talk to those who have never known a world without GPS. People used to just get around. They eventually learned their way around the city. They figured out how to read the city grid. They asked for directions. It worked, and there was a measure of competency that came with that. Now, a lot of people joke that they can’t navigate their own town without GPS. That may seem like a trivial example, but it’s one instance in a larger pattern of individuals feeling increasingly dependent on the tool. They lose competencies, and thus a sense of confidence, purpose, satisfaction, and autonomy in the world.

The convivial tool is basically the opposite of the GPS — a tool you can use in a way that empowers your skills. The map and the compass are very different tools from the GPS device. They require something of you. They will train you in their use in a way that you gain skills. That’s part of the picture for Illich.

The underlying question has to do with our vision for human flourishing: What is the good that we are after? If our vision for human flourishing is to optimize the self as a node in the technologized market network and serve that system to become efficient consumers and producers, the tools that help you get there are of a certain sort. But if human flourishing consists in relationship, in the assortment of skills that sometimes were labeled arts — the art of dying, the arts of memory — then they’re not skills to be optimized, or techniques to be applied, but rather arts and virtues to be cultivated.

Recently, I was at a conference and I was asked: “What technology is an ideal technology?” I usually freeze in those moments, but I had Hannah Arendt on my mind, so I said, “Well, the table.” Things that we don’t think about as tools can be very conducive to flourishing. The table is a piece of human artistry and craftsmanship. It serves a purpose. It brings people together while maintaining their distinction. It allows for conversation, for feasting, for celebration.

Before we go deeper on Illich, Ellul, Arendt, or anyone else, I’d be curious to hear about your pathway into writing, teaching, and becoming such a faithful steward and carrier of their traditions?

As part of my theological education, I was reading The Way of the (Modern) World by Craig Gay, a sociologist who was examining how we often fail to live in accord with our professed beliefs. We have professed values, and yet there’s the evident disjunction between our practice and those professed beliefs. What accounts for this disconnect? In certain strands of religious traditions, one answer to that question is insufficient knowledge: You just need better information, better theological education, and the like.

But Gay suggested that we are formed by the habits implicit in our economic structures, political structures, and scientific technological structures. As we participate in those structures at a pre-rational level, we are being shaped and formed by them. I began to care about understanding the technological structures of our society, in part, because I cared about becoming a certain kind of person. I cared about closing the gap between my professed beliefs, moral aspirations, and actual practice. This is how I got introduced to the work of Arendt, Ellul, and Lewis Mumford — all of whom are very important to me.

I later read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which was my introduction to virtue ethics and the importance of practices. It reinforced caring about tools because they enter a loop of mind, body, and world. Tools are not just an expression of our desires, but they form our desires. Tools are not just an expression of our agency, but constrain and empower our agency. The media ecology angle also became a part of my formation — through Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others — so that it was not just our action into the world that was being mediated by our tools, but our perception of the world. In particular, whatever tools we use to “see the world” mediate the world to us in a specific way.

I’m continually drawn to that larger question of what it means to be a human being, and to the moral dimensions of human existence — and so were these writers. I’ve often described my writing as an attempt to lead others to their work. One of the best compliments I can be paid is, “I read about Jacques Ellul, or Simone Weil, or Hannah Arendt in your work, so I went out, bought the book, and read it for myself.” Mission accomplished.

Your writing has directed me to a lot of these thinkers. This is making me think about your “Amulets Against the Spirits of the Age” piece. In it, you shared this quote from Simone Weil that I found myself returning to frequently last year: “You could not be born at a better time than the present, when we have lost everything.”

I read your work as situated in this prophetic tradition of many of the people you’ve already mentioned — Simone Weil, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Ivan Illich, Hannah Arendt, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and Wendell Berry. How do you think of your role in contributing in this moment? How do you hold the responsibility to bear prophetic witness alongside the responsibility to help build the imagined convivial society?

I’ve struggled with this a bit. Because inevitably the question is, “Well, what then? What now? What’s the practical application?” I understand that question, and I sympathize with it. However, I’ve made peace with the fact that I don’t know that it’s for me to imagine what the answers are. I tend to highlight questions because I think part of the problem is this rush to the answer. Part of what I want to do is slow down our thinking — both for myself and others.

If you press these questions far and deep enough, you find a very different orientation toward the world. It’s the way of being that sees the world as a set of problems to be fixed and to which engineering solutions can be applied. The world becomes a field for us to realize our own aspirations, desires, and wants — where we bring to bear our technical apparatus and knowledge in such a way that the world conforms to our desires and wishes, so that we can act in it with power. This perennial temptation has particular force in the modern world, and it’s explicit in the Western context, where humanity has gained an enormous amount of power over the world (and much of it for the good).

But what gets lost in that way of thinking is a relation to the world that perceives it, first and foremost, as a gift — something to be received, known, and loved in its own right. Obviously there are many philosophical, metaphysical, and religious assumptions at work when I’m articulating that distinction. Because of my own metaphysical and religious commitments, I try to see the world as something to be received with gratitude, as a gift. But even Hannah Arendt — who’s not, herself, a religious person — talks about receiving the world as a “gift from nowhere,” but still as a gift.

That doesn’t mean we should become passive participants in history, but where you start matters. Whether you recognize any constraints to that project matters. Whether you have fundamental gratitude out of which you are working — and a love out of which you are working — that matters a great deal.

I am trying to understand these deeper patterns and logics at work in the modern world, question them, and help recalibrate our fundamental orientation to the world. I am actually a temperate and moderate person, yet all the thinkers I’m drawn to are much more radical in their tenor, temperament, and writing. So that line from Simone Weil is purposefully evocative and challenging. These thinkers push us to ask deeper questions — to the degree where we are uncomfortable with the practice and conduct of our own lives.

Well, you may not agree, but one area where I feel like you’ve been bearing prophetic witness — or, at least, helping people make sense of the world — involves what we’re experiencing around AI. Your most recent piece on “Manufactured Inevitability and the Need for Courage” helped me connect some dots in my own experience.

Just yesterday, I noticed that when I opened Gmail, it was offering to summarize my conversations and automatically complete my sentences. This is what I had in mind when I wrote about manufactured inevitability. People want us to believe that all of this is inevitable — that it’s a natural force, and they’re not responsible for it — and that “resistance is futile.” It’s framed as if we’re facing a choice: Either jump on the bandwagon, or get left behind. Yet, what we see is that this inevitability is manufactured: I didn’t ask for Gmail to auto-summarize or auto-write my emails, but now I have to search through the settings to figure out how to disable it.

A critique of that rhetoric has to be paired with the recognition that you can’t put genies back in the bottle. Once tools are created and put into general use, you have to cope with the world in which these tools exist. The concept of “technological momentum” from the historian Thomas Hughes is helpful here. Early on in development of tools and systems, there’s flexibility. Things can go one way or the other. But over time, especially as infrastructure is developed, you get a momentum that locks certain tools into place and makes it hard to operate without them or against them.

But my chief problem with the rhetoric of inevitability was that it was deployed by those who wanted to foreclose our thinking and judging. It doesn’t want us to think about whether this would be a good development or not for us. Often, it was assumed that it would be good — the new device, the new efficiency, the new mode of optimization — but good for what and good for whom? Maybe good for the bottom line of a company. Maybe good in discrete ways for some individuals. But many of these tools have not been good for us.

I’ve been talking about AI over the past year, with reference to Joseph Weizenbaum, as a fundamentally conservative technology. It is being constructed and deployed to save the appearances of the old systems that we’ve been operating on that may otherwise teeter and collapse. This collapse would give us the freedom, in the spirit of Weil, to imagine new and better forms of life. Weizenbaum argued that computation arrived in the second half of the 20th century to save the day for these older, bureaucratic, often lifeless institutions. AI is being deployed to do the same thing — saving those institutions, ways of life, and modes of being — rather than allowing us to imagine alternatives.

What do you see as a better way for us to relate to this so-called inevitable technological “progress?”

I had an about page on my first blog that articulated the idea that neither a reflexive antagonism nor an unthinking adoption were the right mode. Neither of them had critical reflection. As Arendt put it, “We ought to think what we are doing.” But we need time for that. We also need communities to do this in. Should I decide that adopting certain technologies is not conducive to my own vision of human flourishing — for myself or for my family — there are a few things that I could do within my household. But there’s more that I can do if I’m working with others in small-scale communities. Of course, one of the trends implicit in the technological structures of modernity is that they isolate us. They make it difficult to form the moral communities of deliberation and practice that can help us slow down, think, and make choices.

I once wrote about the tech-savvy Amish, who understood that the adoption of a new tool wasn’t a matter of moral indifference. It wasn’t a neutral thing that you add into the community. They understood that communities are ecosystems. When you introduce a new species into an ecosystem, you don’t just get the same ecosystem plus a new species — you get something wildly different, or, possibly, even ecosystem collapse. So, the Amish decided that they would make deliberate choices about the tools that they introduced into their community. They’re not anti-technological, and they’re not trying to lock in the 19th century, but they are trying to preserve a certain form of communal life.

The advantage is that they’ve managed to operate within small-scale communities. They have that space of moral deliberation, a measure of communal authority, and collective buy-in to their shared project. Most of us don’t have those things, so we find ourselves constructing the communities we need to sustain us as we simultaneously attempt to make the choices we need to sustain us.

In the beginning, you said something about how Illich blows up this supposed tension between freedom and community. Typically, autonomy and community — individualism and communitarianism — are presented in direct opposition with one another, but what I heard you say is that genuine freedom is found through interdependence, or vice versa. Before we close, can you draw out this line of thinking further?

One way I’ve formulated this to myself is, “What is it good for a human being to do, regardless of whether a machine can do it as well or better?” Even if I grant that this AI tool is able to do a task as well as humans, even if it could pass whatever variation of the Turing Test is appropriate to this domain, the question is not, “Can the machine do it?” The question is, “Ought we still to do it anyway, even if we do it worse?” G.K. Chesterton has this line about how “anything that’s worth doing is worth doing badly.” If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing, period.

I thought about this a couple years ago, when AI-generated images were becoming less laughable. Here’s this tool that can produce this sophisticated, glossy image that I could never produce myself. I couldn’t use computer software to generate it. I couldn’t draw it. So do I then stop drawing? If my child presents me with a rough, childlike picture of our living room, do I say, “You know, you could have just prompted DALL-E?”

No, of course not. Because that seemingly inadequate, comparatively deficient rendering was satisfying. If she were to keep at it, she would cultivate a skill. There was something she could take pleasure in. There’s something good about that attempt, regardless of the quality of the outcome. And I think this goes back to that question of, “What is it good for us to do even if a machine can be made to do it as well or better?”

Because as we learn to do things and we persist in doing things, we build up a reservoir of skill, depth, capacity, and autonomy. Then we can call on one another to help one another in community. recently wrote a piece about drills and neighbors that exemplified how this autonomy and interdependence could be complementary. In it, he says something like: “You don’t need to go to the Home Depot and buy a new drill. You can go across the street and ask your neighbor to borrow his.” Maybe your neighbor then says, “Well, I’ll come over. Let me help you.” This is how you build resilient communities. You can stand back from that work and realize that you have saved yourself some money. You have accomplished something that you can say, “I did this.” And, you did it with the help of your neighbor.

When you do something with somebody, you build this little shared memory. It’s a thread in the fabric of the community that you’ve just introduced. You do that enough, and you begin weaving it more tightly. Because we are dependent creatures, we can re-learn to depend on one another. We can re-learn to build trust. I think there’s a path there. But if we choose to allow the machine to continuously usurp our roles, functions, skills, and talents — however middling they may be — we will become more and more dependent on these tools and institutions, and we will become less capable of the interdependence and mutual aid that’s fundamental to our human existence.

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Last October, I found myself in the Appalachian mountains near Roanoke, VA — in what was functionally a glorified high school gymnasium — to watch my favorite band, The Turnpike Troubadours, perform live for the first time.

A lot of the concerts I attend have pretty good gender balance, but not this one. I sat in my seat and soon realized that I was surrounded by a sea of young-ish men, most ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 40s. Some of these men, like me, had dragged their significant others along. But a remarkable number of these men seemed to be attending the concert alone.

Immediately in front of us sat three solo men: a 50-something — squat, and with a white goatee — sandwiched between two 30-somethings wearing mesh hats and hoodies. My wife and I were actively rooting for them to interact before the show. Talk! Buy each other beers! Anything! Instead, they acted like most of the solo men around us: They made no small talk between opening acts, and they stared down at their phones until the concert started.

But when the concert did start, a switch flipped. To my left, to my right, everywhere I looked: individual men, singing at the tops of their lungs, some with tears in their eyes. We sang about broken relationships and returning home on “The Bird Hunters.” We sang about losing family members to addiction in “On The Red River.” The crescendo came when the band played one of their most popular songs, “Good Lord Lorrie.” All around me, men shouted lyrics of loss and longing:

And I’ve been learning that believing and that barely breaking even

It’s just a part of life for you and me

And I’ve been living with the loneliness, it’s got down in my bones I guess

It’s just another phase of being free

And I’ve been learning how to lose a thing I never laid a hand on all along

Well good lord Lorrie, I love you, could it go more wrong

Well good lord Lorrie, I love you, could it go more wrong

I’ve been returning to this concert experience a lot recently as my friend, Soren Duggan, and I have been doing qualitative research on the relational lives of men without degrees. In our interviews, Soren has been asking open-ended questions about friendship, community, role models, and purpose. Here’s what we are not seeing: the stereotype of the man who is very online, very closed up, and very resentful. Rather, what we are seeing looks a lot more like this concert: a sea of isolated young men, openly expressing their feelings of hurt and struggle, yearning for connection but not knowing where or how to begin.

This is not another “what’s wrong with men?” piece, and it’s not another “here’s how we ‘fix’ men” piece. This is a piece in search of understanding — and I believe one “keyhole” for this understanding is in the emotional resonance of groups like The Turnpike Troubadours and their fellow Oklahoman, Zach Bryan.

“I’m condemned, I’m condemned, oh my heart is on the mend”

The pathway to The Turnpike Troubadours for me — as it has been for many men my age and younger — was none other than Zach Bryan, who counts Turnpike as one of his favorite bands. If you haven’t listened to Bryan’s music, you’ve probably still heard about him: He’s gone from serving as a relatively unknown enlisted sailor to building a male-heavy, Springsteen-level following in half a decade. In an era of “Me More Cowboy Than You” working-class cosplaying, Bryan is a genuine “everyman” who somehow accidentally cracked the algorithm and now sells out stadiums (including a concert with the “largest ticketed crowd in U.S. history”).

I first came across Bryan in 2019, when the YouTube algorithm fed me his cover of Jason Isbell’s “Dress Blues.” My eyes started welling up as I was mid-response to some random emails, and I wondered, “Who the hell is this guy?” I soon found myself down the rabbit hole, listening to his early songs like “Godspeed,” “Don’t Give Up On Me,” and “Letting Someone Go” on repeat. I remember listening to songs like “Sweet DeAnn,” Bryan’s ode to his late mother, and thinking, “Man, this guy wears his heart on his sleeve”:

Sweet DeAnn, I miss you so

And your words go where I go

The reasons? I don’t know

But I’ll sing ‘em loud and slow

So you can hear me from the Heavens

And you can draw my thunder down

I miss havin’ you around

But in my heart, you’re always found

I also remember listening to the opening lines of “Condemned” and thinking, “Man, this guy is hard on himself”:

I’m condemned

I’m condemned

Oh, my heart is on the mend

Nobody gives a damn about me

You can tell me that you love me ‘til your little lungs turn blue

But I’m always alone when I fall asleep

The fact that Bryan has cultivated such a devout male following with lyrics like this is no accident; it’s a sign of his emotional resonance with young men’s experiences. Our interview transcripts with these guys read much less like a manosphere podcast and much more like a Zach Bryan song.1

Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t trying to be stoics; they’re often emotionally aware to the point of wearing their hearts on their sleeves:

“I was a mess throughout my 20s. I could not hold it together. Every anniversary of every person in my life who’s died, I was a mess, and it was all going totally unchecked. In the midst of that, my close friends were all casualties. I was just burning bridges left and right … I could not handle my emotions at all, and so I … went on a decade of rampage, just, ‘all right, delete that friend, delete that friend,’ and, now, I don’t have any friends.” - P., 33

Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t self-assured; they’re often unconfident, uncertain, and, at times, deeply insecure:

“I have absolutely low self-esteem… That stops me from [making friends]. I’m afraid of just embarrassing myself.” - J.B., 27

Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t on the path to self-optimization; they’re often just grasping for something, anything really, to hold onto in their lives:

“I’m just trying to figure out something I want to do in my life that’s gonna change my community in a positive light. I’m looking for purpose — something bigger than me — something that can make change in someone’s life or my life. I’m just here, just passing by — and that doesn’t sit well with me.” - V., 29

Like Bryan, the men without degrees we interviewed aren’t looking to the old scripts of stoicism, machismo, and rugged individualism to live a good life. They’re emotionally open, self-critical (often, overly so), and yearning for camaraderie. And, like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed are grasping for something new — new community, new friends, new mentors, new purpose — but what they’re grasping for often proves elusive.

“I’ve had a couple great friends, and losing them hurt too bad”

But what connects Bryan and Turnpike to their audiences and the men we interviewed isn’t just this emotional resonance; it’s also a shared experience of addiction and its ripple effects. Bryan announced his sobriety late last year after he found himself in a “downward spiral” from drinking. The Turnpike Troubadours took an “indefinite hiatus” in 2019 so that their lead singer, Evan Felker, could get sober before returning to the stage. A young Bryan even wrote a song about Felker’s alcoholism and recovery: “Felker, we need you here / To re-affirm our fears / Felker, won’t you get well / You’ve got stories to tell.”

For Bryan and Felker, the losses that often accompany addiction are personal. Both Bryan’s mom and Felker’s dad passed away due to alcoholism, and both have written about their parents’ addiction and deaths. On “From a Lover’s Point of View,” Bryan writes: “But now’s about the time, look, you really got to decide / Are you gonna be a good man to me or die the way your mother died?” And, in “On The Red River,” Felker’s memorial to his father, he shares:

On days off, we’d help out our neighbors

And we smiled and we sweated for free

You’d earned every drink with your labor

And I’d sleep on your front seat ‘til three

And you’d call it a cure for a snake bite

And reach for a fifth of Old Crow

Some medicine should get your head right

When your symptoms were starting to show

If the shadow of addiction, loss, and the hurt it causes looms large in Bryan’s and Felker’s words, it looms just as large in many of the interviews we’ve conducted with young men. We asked no questions about addiction, yet it has come up in many of our interviews, especially when we ask about friendship:

“Throughout my life, I’ve had trouble relying on anybody, with both my parents being alcoholics. I’m not placing blame, but … they weren’t reliable. I just learned, ‘You can’t rely on other people. Rely on yourself.’ ... So then it becomes harder to start a friendship, because what the person interprets as you being cold and standoffish is just my inability to feel like I can rely on another person.” - J., 43

“I had a couple close friends die from drug overdoses. Then my last girlfriend … the way she was [drinking] was a whole lot different, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.” - A., 39

“If the whole point of a friendship is to get to a point where that friendship creates a bond that puts them where they’re pretty much family … I think that’s like the overall goal, as far as God’s concerned, is that we’ll get to where we’re all close together and rely on one another and look for what we can do for one another … but I’ve had a couple great friends, and losing them hurt too bad. I don’t know if it’s worth it to me to experience that again.” - D., 40

Stories like these of addiction and loss aren’t just incidental to Bryan’s and Felker’s songs or our interviews; they are fundamental. For Bryan, Felker, and many of the men we’ve spoken to, the experience of addiction and loss is what often shatters existing relationships and hinders them from building new ones.

“Come back from the dark somehow”

But addiction and broken relationships haven’t gotten the last word for Bryan or Felker. Both have become the flawed heroes of their own redemption myths built on sobriety and relational repair.

For Bryan, redemption has a lot to do with overcoming his family genes of alcoholism. The chorus of his new song, “DeAnn’s Denim,” includes the lines: “And are you strong enough to stay away from family genes? / ‘Cause DeAnn’s denim was a stubborn thing,” and concludes with, “I cleaned out the closet, found some closure when I threw those old blue jeans on the floor.” Meanwhile, for Felker, the anchor song of The Turnpike Troubadours’ most recent album, “Heaven Passing Through,” is explicitly about his redemption in returning to his marriage and becoming a father:

Now we stare up and I say constellations that I know

You repeat ‘em back, but you don’t care, you’re only three years old

It’s nice to see the world the same as someone

It feels so good to be up late, pretending that I’m young

Like Felker and Bryan, most of the men we interviewed haven’t given up. None of them sees themselves as victims, and almost all of them are seeking some form of redemption, too. For some, it’s in building relationships. For some, it’s in becoming mentors and role models. For some, it’s in contributing to something bigger than themselves.

“The younger generation coming up, they’re lost too. I want to try to give them an answer on how to be a good man. Like, ‘It’s okay to cry; that doesn’t make you less of a man. You don’t have to be this tough guy all the time.’ That’s where I’m at.” - V., 29

“If I was a part of something, I wouldn’t be looking for friends. I could find friends inside of the organization that I belong to. I could always have somebody to go to for advice or for help. I could feel like I always have a team … That’s the bottom line. I just want to be a part of a team.” - K., 31

The challenge is that most of these men don’t know where to begin. They are not rockstars like Felker or Bryan whose words are overanalyzed in pieces like this. They are mostly disconnected men whose experiences are mostly invisible because of their isolation. The connections these men do have, if any, are tenuously held, and the gulf between them and new relationships — be they friends or mentors — feels overwhelmingly vast.

Which brings me back to that Turnpike Troubadours concert. About halfway through the show, Felker belted the moving chorus of “Heaven Passing Through”:

Come back from the dark somehow

Finally living in the here and now

No sign of a thundercloud following you

Don’t take it personal

The world don’t turn around you

Hold on to the moment like it’s Heaven passing through

As the song concluded with those same lines, something simple but profound happened. The older man in front of us embraced the younger men to his left and his right in each of his arms. Then, a brief group hug, followed by a few high fives and a beer run.

A gulf closed. A place to begin.

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So if you’re walkin’ down the street sometime

And spot some hollow, ancient eyes

Please don’t just pass ‘em by and stare

As if you didn’t care

Say, “Hello in there, hello”

- John Prine, “Hello in There”

It was 9:30PM last Sunday when an ambulance and several police cars pulled up to our neighbor’s house. The flashing red and blue was quickly followed by the sound of a front door being forced open. Then, a long silence. When the ambulance didn’t speed away, a sinking feeling came over me: Randy was dead.1

Randy was my next-door neighbor. Not once did I have a conversation with him. Not once did I spend time with him. He spent almost every hour of every day in his home, alone, and he died in his home, alone.

I lived next to Randy for the last year and a half of his life. In that time, I could’ve practiced what I preached and been a good neighbor. I could’ve checked in on him. I could’ve brought him meals. I could’ve offered him some form of neighborly accompaniment. In doing so, I probably could’ve helped make his final year a little better — a little warmer, a little more connected, a little more joyful. But I didn’t, and now I can’t.

I’ve spent an hour trying to figure out how to anchor this piece. I don’t have any big ideas to spread, any practical actions to share, or any contrarian points to make. I suppose I’m just trying to make sense of my shame over the distance between my words and my deeds: of being the guy who listened to John Prine in the kitchen while leaving Randy to die alone in his.

When I first moved in, I didn’t realize Randy was my neighbor. I thought his house was vacant. The back of the house was overgrown with vines. The kitchen table was littered with empty water bottles, and nothing else. It looked like the home of someone who had already died. Then, one day, I looked through the kitchen window and, to my surprise, I saw a man in a wheelchair.

I found out his name was Randy, and I progressively learned of his situation from our other neighbors. Randy was born in the house next door, grew up there, never married, and never left. As his parents and siblings passed away, he became increasingly isolated. As his health deteriorated, his world became smaller. A life spent outside tending to his beloved garden eventually shrank to a life confined inside the four walls of his childhood home.

We have one of the most lively blocks in town, but Randy was the least active member of it. When hundreds of kids would descend on the block for Halloween, Randy was the only one not out on his front porch giving away candy. When the annual “Porchella” porch music festival flooded our block with music and people, Randy was seemingly the only neighbor not in the streets. On a block where most neighbors participate in the life of the neighborhood, Randy’s absence was a presence.

Still, from what I could tell, Randy wasn’t hiding in his home; he seemed to want to be seen. He spent his days in his living room, perched in his wheelchair, staring out the window into our well-traversed street. Whenever my wife or I would walk by, we would wave at him. If he saw us, his whole face would light up, and he would excitedly wave back. Whenever either of us shoveled snow from his sidewalk, ramp, and steps, he would wave with gratitude. This was the extent of the neighborliness we showed to Randy: small gestures of care, but nothing more.

My wife and I would often discuss ways that we could connect with Randy beyond simply waving or shoveling. One of our neighbors once told us that Randy loved Chick-fil-A. Could we drop him off a chicken sandwich for dinner one night? We often make home-cooked meals for ourselves. Could we make dinner for three instead, and eat it together on his front porch? We have a Saturday morning routine of going to the farmer’s market. Could we knock on his door every week before we go and ask him if he needs anything?

All of this amounted to lots of ideas and plans, but no action or follow-through. Life, with all its other ideas, plans, priorities, and distractions, got in the way — and our window to accompany Randy ran out.

In hindsight, all we had to do was start by saying, “Hello in there, hello.” But we didn’t, and now we can’t.

It’s been 10 days since Randy’s death. In that time, I’ve been asking myself, “How is it that we fell so short of the great commandment to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself?’” Each answer I’ve landed on is as embarrassing as it is inadequate.

I’ll start with my clear avoidance of the possibility of discomfort. On several occasions, I would walk by Randy’s house, see him staring out the window, and think, “I should knock on the door and say hello.” I’d take a step toward the door, hesitate, then take two steps back. Some of the rumors I heard would start swirling in my head — that he had garbage piled inside his house, that he wheeled around with a towel covering his waist (and nothing else) — and I’d immediately come up with a set of excuses to avoid taking the final 10 steps toward his door. What if the house still smelled bad? What if he did just have that towel over his waist? What if he is a little bit crazy? Faced with the tiny risk of having an awkward interaction with Randy, I chose the comfort of waving from afar, then putting my head down and walking the final steps back to my house.

I also was guilty of the evergreen, self-justifying feeling that I was “just too busy.” Oftentimes, when I would walk by and see Randy through the window, it would be in the middle of the workday and I was in between meetings. Caught between my better angels and neurotic tendencies, I’d rationalize my way into another set of excuses I’m not proud of. What if I got stuck in a long conversation with him? What if he actually did need help with something, right then and there? And what if that made me late to my next Zoom call? (the horror!). I prioritized my abstract, mostly remote work over connecting with the particular person who lived next door.

This gets at the most indicting answer for my inaction: selfishness. We had a year and a half to have one conversation with Randy that could have opened the door to a relationship. Instead, we chose our work, our home, and ourselves. How many slow Fridays did we have when we could have had that “terrifying” 30-minute conversation? How many quiet Saturdays did we have when we could have dropped off some food? How many dinners did we talk about doing something for Randy, then ultimately choose to “do it later” (which now means never)? The harsh truth is I could summon the energy to create a microgrant initiative to bring 500-plus Charlottesville neighbors together, but I couldn’t knock on my isolated neighbor’s door.

In a prior draft, I considered telling a story that isn’t solely about my personal responsibility. I considered pointing to our confusing cultural script for being a good neighbor, where I’m expected to both respect my neighbors’ privacy and help my neighbors in need. I considered pointing to our atrophying social structures; for instance, I’m not a member of a church or service organization that would teach me, support me, and give me the practice reps of being a good neighbor. I even considered pointing to the economic reality that I don’t own my home, and thus I don’t have the same stake in my neighborhood as most of my neighbors.

But placing the blame on forces I couldn’t control would mean willfully denying all the things I could control. I had more resources on how to be a good neighbor than 99.9 percent of the population, but I never consulted them. I knew dozens of neighborhood leaders who I could’ve contacted for advice, but I never reached out to them. I felt the moral imperative to love my neighbor, but I never acted on it.

I walked by Randy’s house almost every day. Not once did I say, “Hello in there, hello.”

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If running a bustling, historic store and performance venue wasn’t enough, Heather and Dylan founded The Handmade Music School in 2016, which is dedicated to teaching young people old time, bluegrass, and traditional music and dance from Floyd County. The philosophy of school is to “hand down” the songs and dances from the teacher to the student — phrase-by-phrase and step-by-step — the way it’s been taught in the Blue Ridge for centuries. It’s a tradition sustained by relationship, both between the student and teacher, and between the teacher and all the teachers that came before.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the themes of tradition, stewardship, and durability came up prominently throughout my conversation with Heather and Dylan. What is the responsibility of community leaders like Heather and Dylan, who are stewards of traditions that they’ve both inherited and hope to pass along? How do they hold the tensions between sustaining communal traditions and adapting them to the times? And what will be the key for the institution of The Floyd Country Store — and the traditions that it carries — to be around for another 100-plus years?

This conversation, more than any other I’ve had through the newsletter, was imbued with a genuine reverence for the traditions, culture, and community of a particular place. Please consider giving the full interview a read. If you’d like to learn more, consider checking out The Floyd Country Store’s website, social media (Facebook, Insta), and TV and YouTube channels. And if you really want to experience the magic of The Floyd Country Store yourself, consider paying a visit to the Friday Night Jamboree — I went in May, and it was one of my favorite nights of the year.

- Sam

As someone who has visited The Floyd Country Store, I recognize that it’s way more than just a store. If anything, it’s a community and cultural hub for the region. But for our readers who may not be familiar with the store, how would you begin to describe all that you do?

Dylan (D): We cultivate and strengthen community through experiences in music, dance, art, and food that are rooted in our Appalachian traditions. Our products are these experiences: Meaningful and, hopefully, transformational experiences that make you feel invited into a community. Once we are all there in community, we can talk about ways to strengthen it through our traditions. We’re all about communities embracing their place-based traditions — in our community, that’s food, farming, and music — because these are the things that keep us connected to each other and our shared place.

There are four spokes that keep the wheel of The Floyd Country Store turning. Food is a spoke: You can meet here and have a meal together. Music is a spoke: You can meet here and dance together almost every night of the week. Intentional products are also a spoke: An old country store used to be a gathering place where you would go, get the stuff you needed, and see your neighbors and community. We’re trying to hold onto the magic of the old country store with our retail. And education is a spoke: The Handmade Music School is giving everything else oxygen, passing our musical traditions on to the next generation.

Heather (H): The music and traditions of our region are often carried by the people of our region, not written down. This is very different from the modern world. Learning this music and these traditions requires being in direct relationship with the person who is teaching you. With the Handmade Music School, I’m always looking for the right people who are carrying these traditions to teach the kids and pass them along. This gives the elders of our community a purpose, and parents are eager to have their kids participate in the program because it facilitates these intergenerational relationships.

It strikes me that you two share a sense of reverence — both for the particular traditions of your region, and for the particular relationships that pass along these traditions.

H: We’re drawing on an oral tradition, where things have been passed down knee-to-knee and hand-by-hand. Because of the mountains in this region, counties were isolated from one another, so every tune sounded different from county-to-county. You could be 30 miles away in Franklin County, and the same tune would be played differently than it was played here in Floyd County. We try to teach people how the tunes were played in Floyd; that way, our students and community members can stay connected to their regional identity and history. The music acts as this relational thread that connects our community across time and place.

D: This Appalachian music is some of the best music I’ve ever heard. It’s beautiful. It has a deep history and stories that connect all around the world. We understand the timeline of when this music landed here and how it swelled up into this incredible art form. When we present live music, we don’t do it frivolously or shallowly. We realize that when people are coming together to play music and dance on Friday nights, it is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. It is what the people who lived here would have done at the end of a long, hard day. This is keeping something alive that has superpowers.

It’s not like you both “started” The Floyd Country Store; you became owners of it 11 years ago. I also know y’all have regulars who have been coming every Friday and Saturday night for decades. How did you approach working with these regulars as you took over and became stewards of many of their traditions?

D: When we became owners, we started by intentionally building trust. We didn’t make a lot of changes really fast. There are people who have been coming here every Friday night for 40 years. We would always sit down with them and ask them for input on things, like changes to the ticket price or changes to the gospel set. We did that for quite a few years.

H: I started working for the store in 2006 with the previous owners. I got introduced to the fixtures and the regulars during that time, so when we transitioned to being owners, people already knew who we were. Those longstanding relationships were helpful for continuing to be caretakers of the space. The regulars have shared values around care for community: They look out for the space, they look out for each other. They always have a card going around for someone who is sick.

No one owns the traditions. We are all here as stewards. Many of the regulars act as if they’re hosts. Newer people have deemed themselves hosts, too. They’ll often go and grab people and invite them to join them on the dancefloor. It’s always been that way — people feel responsible for maintaining the tradition of invitation and welcoming. People also feel responsible for tending to the space if guests are out of line. They’ll enforce the norms of the space — kindly and respectfully.

D: The “dancefloor” stuff that happens is incredibly powerful. A few years ago, Mary Louise Kelly from NPR did an interview with the poet Tess Taylor, who visited Floyd in 2016, just after the presidential election. She was feeling a little unsure in our small rural Southwest Virginia town. But after she participated in the square dance — dancing with strangers, with very old dance forms, and upholding this responsibility to the process — she talked about having an “epiphany” on the dance floor. She saw this type of art and dance as “civic repair”: We can find ourselves, and one another, in those shared spaces.

I imagine it can be difficult to strike a balance between sustaining the communal traditions you’ve inherited and adapting these traditions amidst a changing community and culture. Have you made any changes? What have they looked like?

D: We understand that the traditions being presented in front of us are diverse, sharing contributions from Native Americans and African Americans, Scots-Irish and others. There are many cultures represented on the dancefloor every night. We are bringing these traditions into modern times — particularly, adding new flavors to the music and dance — without losing what they meant and were about hundreds of years ago. We host performances where you sit down and you listen. We have our lively Friday Night Jamboree. We host old time dances on Saturday — so you have more elbow room to do your dance thing — and we have Honky Tonk partner-style dancing on Thursdays.

But now I’m starting to bring in things like Black sacred steel music from North Carolina, blues, New Mexican string bands, and even Mexilachian fusion. As we’ve diversified our music, the audiences that are coming are diversifying. People are coming and saying things like, “I had no idea what to expect, and that was the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

The store also became more of a tourist destination about a decade before we became owners — when The Crooked Road Music Heritage Trail was formed. A lot of communities and musicians were initially turned off by it: The focus on tourism and economic development felt a little bit exploitative. But there’s been a softening in attitudes toward the heritage trail — even an embracing of it — over the 20 years it’s been in existence. Now, there are people from literally all around the world who come to The Floyd Country Store on Friday nights. These people may be from places locals see stereotyped in the news as “dangerous,” and then they’re nice people out on the dancefloor having fun dancing with you. I’ve never seen anyone ever give anyone else a hard time for being there.

We can also get stereotyped from the outside as having this hillbilly, yokel, backwoods type of culture. But, today, a lot of the locals have a sense of pride that the world comes to this little one stoplight town to appreciate, respect, and participate in the identity and culture of the place.

There are not many institutions that can say they’ve been a community hub for 100-plus years. What lessons do you think can be learned from The Floyd Country Store’s durability? What needs to happen to ensure that The Floyd Country Store is around for another 100 years?

H: We’re gardeners, and we don’t want these traditions to die off. Our kids are the seedlings. I’m doing the programming for the young people: We put a lot of energy and care into teaching our students the values and traditions of our community, and making them accessible. The work is a constant dance of responding to what the community needs now. It’s never done; there’s no ending point. Our job is to stay awake and pay attention and listen and help. Spread the fertilizer and give the garden the nutrients it needs to grow.

D: A tree can grow for hundreds of years if its ecosystem is healthy and things aren’t coming in to cut it down. The Floyd Country Store is meant to be here. Are there external forces — technological, financial, and otherwise — that can cut us down? Yes. But we’re also keeping our eyes open to the threats and we’re committed to protecting the ecosystem. We’ll tie ourselves to the tree if we need to. These traditions have lasted a long time and they aren’t going anywhere. The key to the durability of The Floyd Country Store is simple: We trust that humans will always be seeking the oasis — they will always be seeking connection.

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As you’re resting, we invite you to peruse our November edition of the Tissue Review. Each month, we compile our members-onl…

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In high school, I would go to the Y for an hour before school started, then at least three hours after school got out. I spent so much time on the basketball court that I was eventually offered my first job as a “Court Manager.” This entailed dry-mopping the court when I arrived, dry-mopping the court when I left, and shooting on “The Gun” for several hours in between. Though my high school jewfro may be long gone (sorry if that’s not PC; that’s what we called it), my Y patronage is still going strong. I became a “nationwide” member about a decade ago, and since, I’ve visited well over 100 Ys across four cross-country road trips and dozens of regional trips. You didn’t ask for it, but here are my official YMCA superlatives:

• The Best Place to Play Pickup Basketball: The Irsay Family YMCA in Indianapolis

• The Easiest Y to Get Lost In: The Cambridge YMCA

• The Best-Named Room in a YMCA: The “Randy Travis Wellness Center” at the Rapid City YMCA

I’m essentially a Y connoisseur, and I’ve come to think of the Y as one of the most remarkable institutions in the U.S. Part of the Y’s remarkability is its unmatched geographic footprint: As I’ve learned on my road trips, no matter where you are in the country, you’re likely no more than an hour from the nearest Y. Another remarkable element is its cross-class membership: In many communities, the Y is one of the only third places where residents from all class backgrounds can participate alongside one another. The Y is also remarkable (to me, at least) because it’s a federated network: Each institution is governed locally, and then part of the national network, so power flows from the bottom-up (not the top-down). Historically, this distributed model has been fertile ground for experimentation. For instance, James Naismith invented basketball at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield in 1891, George Corsan invented group swim lessons at the Detroit YMCA in 1909, and Joseph Sobek invented racquetball at the Greenwich YMCA (of course) in 1950.

Despite these strengths, it’s hard to deny that the YMCA has strayed from its communal, participatory, experimental, and soulful roots. The Y was once an institution of genuine “membership,” where you were expected to benefit, contribute, and deepen your participation; now, Y membership can feel more like a pure transaction. The Y was once an institution of bottom-up experimental ferment, where new sports were invented (see above) and new clubs and forms of civic life were created; now, the Y is more of a conduit for top-down campaigns initiated by government or philanthropy. The Y was once an institution focused on the collective “spiritual formation” of young people and adults; now, it feels more like a place for individualized, secularized “wellness.” And, at the most basic level, the Y was once a place where people would talk to each other all the time; now, the Y can have the feel of a library: A sea of silent individuals on their phones, with their headphones in, following their own workouts.

It is because of all the things that make the Y remarkable — along with all of the ways it has fallen short — that I believe the Y has more untapped potential than any institution in the U.S. I believe in the spirit that inspired the YMCA’s founding, and I believe that this same spirit can be renewed and re-embedded within this 175-year-old anchor of civic life. My sense is that national and local Y leadership feel similarly, and the YMCA’s new 10-year strategic plan focused on “creating connected communities” can be a rallying cry for spiritual and institutional renewal. But what should this renewal look like? And, more importantly, how should this renewal be realized?

What follows is my initial attempt to imagine the possibilities for institutional renewal within local Ys and across the YMCA network. It’s not much focused on youth because, well, I don’t know what I’m talking about in that realm. It’s not a strategic plan, and it’s not a fully-baked suite of programs to be implemented from the top-down. It’s not even a set of ideas that only the Y can act on. Rather, it’s my first crack at a few principles that could guide this renewal — along with a smattering of experiments, organized around these principles, to be run at local Ys and potentially diffused throughout the federated network. Consider this list a starting point, not an end point. I invite you to read it. I invite you to respond in the comments (or email me directly) with your ideas for the Y’s renewal. And, if the spirit moves you, I invite you to put these experiments into practice in your local Y community.

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Principles

1. Cultivate civic “membership.”

The YMCA can orient its strategy not just around promoting “belonging” and “connection,” but cultivating civic “membership”: a type of communal relationship into which we are invited to benefit and to which we are asked to actively contribute our gifts. This means intentionally facilitating members’ connection to one another and the Y, and it means expecting members to participate in caring for and shaping the institution. A Y organized around this version of “membership” would engender a form of deep belonging: Members would become such a part of the community that they feel responsible for honoring its past, stewarding its present, and creating its future.

2. “Thicken” the community.

The YMCA can become a “thick” community — that is, a community where members have continuous opportunities to broaden, deepen, and grow through their participation over time. Thick communities often look like communities within communities — not just a single activity, program, or group — inviting members into several accessible entry points for participation, encouraging members to diversify and deepen their involvement through a range of outlets, and calling members into contribution and leadership. A thicker community at the Y is a stickier community at the Y; it’s a community built not on one membership, but a web of overlapping memberships.

3. Commit to experimentation.

The YMCA can renew itself by re-embracing its experimental roots. This means encouraging experiments within local Ys, no matter how weird or off-the-wall they may be. This means celebrating the learnings that come from the successes and shortcomings of these experiments. And this means diffusing, adapting, and translating successful experiments across the federated network. An experimental Y can become an alive Y — one that is renewing itself from within, and, in the process, renewing civic life in the communities it calls home.

1. Cultivate Membership

Establish official roles and committees to promote “membership.”

If local Ys want to commit to making themselves genuine communities of civic “membership,” they could create official “Membership Director” positions and “Membership Committees” to integrate a civic membership lens across their activities. Such membership roles and committees would not be all that different from the role and I envisioned in the City Membership toolkit. Membership Directors could be full-time roles dedicated to advancing the strategy, coordination, and community engagement for fostering connection and membership at the Y. Membership Committees could involve a mix of leaders from across Y departments — along with some Y members and local community leaders — all committed to working through the Y to bolster community membership.

This could be a big commitment, so where should local Ys begin? The Membership Committee is a good place to start, generating buy-in across Y leaders, members, and community partners to promote connection and membership within the Y and in the broader community. From there, Y leadership can identify an existing role at the Y, adding to that position the responsibilities of strategizing, experimenting with, coordinating, and driving membership. Eventually, this could be expanded to a full-time, standalone Membership Director position. The Membership Director and Membership Committee can serve as both the foundation and quarterback for a Y’s membership and connection efforts. These roles signal and begin to institutionalize the Y’s investment in strengthening membership — both within and beyond the Y’s four walls.

Create “Welcoming Liaison” roles to help welcome new members.

It can be really hard to meet people when joining a new Y, especially if you’re new to the place where you’re joining. But the Y can make it easier for newcomers to integrate into the Y community by intentionally focusing on welcoming new members. Imagine if every Y had a crew of “Welcoming Liaisons” — members who have a responsibility to introduce themselves to new members, connect them with fellow members who they would get along with, and refer them to activities that may be of interest. Think of these welcoming liaisons as serving a similar role to a religious leader who welcomes new congregants: They would provide a warm welcome to new members, and they would invite them to get more deeply involved in the community. It is important that these welcomes feel organic; that’s why members should take on this role rather than staff. How, if at all, should these welcoming liaisons be compensated? A small monthly stipend or a free membership could likely do the trick.

This minor investment would be well worth it: A community where members feel they are welcomed, connected, and contributing is a community that members are far more likely to commit to for the long-haul.

Invite members to participate in decision-making and governance.

Membership at most Ys feels more like the transactional exchange you experience at any old gym than a membership where you’re expected to contribute and participate in decision-making. But the Y isn’t any old gym, and it doesn’t need to act like one. The Y can tap back into its cooperative roots and invite members to shape everything from activities, to programs, to leadership, to organizational governance. This could begin with a lower-lift option, such as launching a board of directors committee exclusively for members (who aren’t just the big donors). In time, the Y can become a fully participatory institution, creating many entry points for members to host events and activities, many roles for members to participate in leadership (not just volunteer), and many committees for members to join in co-governance of the business and membership.

Such a cultural and structural shift could transform the Y member experience from something that is merely consumed, to something that is co-created and co-produced. This shift toward collective governance — first at a few Ys, then across the Y network — could have systemic implications too, helping to rebuild our withered civic muscles.

2. Thicken Community

Serve as the local connective tissue.

The vast majority of communities are missing a civic institution with a sole focus on strengthening the connective tissue of local civic life. Such an institution would connect residents to one another, connect residents to civic groups, and connect civic groups with one another. In an ideal world, these missing connective tissue institutions would be locally rooted, but connected horizontally across place (think a Chamber of Commerce, but for civic life). Given the Y’s national geographic footprint, bottom-up federated network model, and commitment to membership, it can evolve into this institution in many neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions across the country.

But to become the connective tissue for their local communities, the Y would really need to turn out beyond its four walls and position itself as a civic hub. This would mean expanding its constituency of care to include all community residents (not just paying Y members). This would mean inviting local civic groups, their leaders, and neighbors in as co-governing members of a shared project to strengthen local civic life. And this would mean committing to the adaptive, iterative, and collaborative work of civic cultivation of their particular places, not a set of “silver bullet” programs, activities, or solutions. Some of the ideas that follow — becoming a “club of clubs,” hosting activities fairs, offering microgrants — can be initial steps toward testing and realizing this vision.

Become a “club of clubs.”

Many local groups and clubs have leaders who don’t know each other, membership bases that are siloed from one another, difficulties with accessing space, and challenges with just getting off the ground. By becoming a “club of clubs,” the Y can serve as a homebase for clubs to meet and host events, encourage these groups to organize cross-over gatherings together, and provide a space for group leaders to connect with and support one another (a la Build IRL). Also like Build IRL, the Y could even become a place where people who want to start new clubs and groups go to launch them. This approach would both break clubs and their members out of their siloes and seed new groups in the community. Plus, it would have the added benefit of helping to “thicken” community at the Y, creating the conditions for new and existing Y members to deepen and diversify their involvement as members.

Host an annual “activities fair.”

Many Y’s already host summer camp fairs and youth sports fairs for kids; there is no reason they shouldn’t also organize “activities fairs” or “joining fairs” for adults. I’ve written about this idea before, and it’s a simple one: Host a one-day event where groups are invited to showcase their work, and people are invited to learn about and potentially join these groups. The key to success is generating enough buy-in from both sides — community groups and residents alike — to ensure sufficient turnout to make participation in the activities fair worthwhile. A local Y could start by experimenting with a pilot activities fair — both to take lessons learned and create some momentum — before turning it into an annual event. Hosting an activities fair would be a win-win for the local Y and their community. The act of organizing the event would help the Y build more connectivity with community groups and residents, while participation in the activities fair would help boost resident participation and membership in the community groups that make up civic life.

Create clubs and support groups for parents.

Every day, Ys across the country welcome diverse groups of parents to support their kids’ swim lessons, practices, games, and more. This presents an opportunity to build social support for parents, especially across lines of class, race, and geography. While the Y already has “Family Time” programs, they could go a level deeper and create ongoing clubs and support groups for parents. These groups could meet while their kids are at the Y for activities, and they could take many forms, including peer support groups for both parents, dads-only groups, moms-only groups, or activity-based groups. Regardless of form, the key would be to create accessible and consistent outlets for parents to connect and deepen their relationships — both in general and across lines of difference.

3. Commit to Experimentation

Provide grants to local Ys to promote experimentation.

Re-engendering an ethos of experimentation across the YMCA network will likely involve cultural change in many local Ys. To encourage more experimentation, YMCA National can give out grants to local Ys to experiment with new practices, activities, programs, roles, and other ideas to deepen connection, belonging, and membership. Such grants need not be large (e.g., $5,000-$10,000) and should be minimally restrictive. Local Y leaders (maybe even members) should be able to propose a test, share what they hope to learn, and receive funding to try it out. YMCA National can create a community of practice of grantees to facilitate peer support, live learning, and, in time, the broader diffusion of experiments that “worked.” Not only can these experimentation grants help the Y begin to rediscover its legacy of experimentation, but they can also leverage the Y’s federated network to its advantage, planting seeds of renewal that can be spread from place-to-place.

Experiment with “screen-free” hours (and days).

It’s harder to meet people in gyms than it used to be, in part because everyone has their headphones in and they’re staring at their phone screens. If the Y wants to be a site of genuine connection, they should experiment with going “screen-free.” This could start with something as simple as identifying one Saturday morning, maybe from 7AM-10AM, as a screen-free morning experiment. If it shows promise, this could evolve to become a monthly or weekly ritual — every Saturday from 7AM-10AM could be a screen-free morning. Then, if that worked, imagine if the Y observed a sabbath from screens every Saturday, all day. The upshot of this experiment could be transformational, both renewing the Y as a place of conversation and connection (at least on Saturdays!) and, potentially, creating a translatable model for phone-free third places beyond the Y.

Organize an annual “Neighborhood Olympics.”

In many communities, neighbors lack connection with each other within their neighborhoods, and neighbors certainly lack connection across neighborhoods. The YMCA could take inspiration from Warm Cookies of the Revolution’s “Stompin’ Ground Games” and host a “Neighborhood Olympics.” This Olympics-style competition could encourage neighbors, both kids and adults, to team up on various sporting events (i.e., basketball, soccer, etc.) and compete against other neighborhoods. Considering that most Ys have experience organizing sports camps and leagues — and most Ys have longstanding relationships with the community — local Ys could be well-positioned to host neighborhood olympics in their communities. The initial experiment could be something as simple as a few small tournaments — 3-on-3 basketball, cornhole, pie-eating contests, you name it — with neighborhoods competing against each other. But, over time, a neighborhood olympics could become an enduring community ritual that connects neighbors to another and to the place they call home.

Create a community microgrants initiative.

Just as a Neighborhood Olympics can activate neighbors to connect with one another in fun and joyful ways, so too can microgrants for neighbor gatherings. As I wrote about a few months ago, microgrant initiatives both create the permission structure for neighbors to take the countercultural (and often vulnerable) step of bringing their neighbors together, and the accountability structure for organizers to actually follow through on hosting these gatherings.

The YMCA, with its deep community roots and broad community reach, is just the type of anchor institution that could organize and run these microgrant programs. Local Ys can start with a microgrant experiment as simple as the one I ran in Charlottesville this past spring — perhaps distributing 50 microgrants at $100 per microgrant to members and non-members alike, and encouraging neighbors to either propose their own gathering or host a specific type of gathering (i.e., dinners, block parties, etc.). In time, local Ys can make these microgrant initiatives an annual tradition in their communities, much like the City of Boston’s microgrants for summer block parties. While the microgrants should be for the whole community, not just Y members, the very act of promoting, running, and distributing the microgrants will help the Y cultivate further relationships and credibility in the places they serve.

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Connection, so hot right now.

Everywhere I look, words like “connection,” “community,” “civic,” and “belonging” seem to be the dominant concepts of the zeitgeist. I am obviously experiencing some availability bias because, well, I write a newsletter called Connective Tissue. But I also don’t think I’m totally off-base. Our last Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, made connection the centerpiece of his public platform and “parting prescription.” Our nation’s largest civic institution, the YMCA, is making “Creating Connected Communities” the guiding principle of its next 10-year strategic plan. Some of the world’s largest VC firms, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia, have made bets on loneliness being an untapped multi-hundred-billion-dollar market. And our preeminent elite media organizations, The Atlantic and New York Times, have each published major stories with titles like “The Anti-Social Century” and “Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely.”

I’ve begun to call this moment what I think it is: a connection craze. And like the climate and equity crazes of the 2010s and early 2020s, they tend to follow a familiar pattern. After generations of under-the-radar organizing and research, the movement goes mainstream. All of a sudden, new nonprofits and programs emerge to solve these new problems (which, often, aren’t new). Philanthropic funders attempt to create new fields made of these new nonprofits and programs. Politicians begin incorporating new lenses into their political messaging. Policymakers begin applying these new lenses to their actual policies. Startups begin building new products for these new markets. Investors begin investing in these products as part of new investment theses. Journalists begin writing on these new beats, and thought leaders begin thought-leading (?) on them. Slowly, then seemingly overnight, we’re swept up in the frenzy of the craze.

Before I go any further, I want to be clear: Crazes like this usually emerge for good reasons. A core insight or revelation spurs mostly well-intended people to take action to address a legitimate societal problem, such as the widespread degradation of our natural world or the injustices faced by Black Americans. In our emergent connection craze, the 1-2 punch of our mass social media and smartphone experiment followed by prolonged COVID lockdowns — each occurring amidst a 50-plus year decline in associational and religious life — created a collective moment of reckoning on the importance of human connection and community. I’m genuinely heartened by parts of this craze, both because it validates the community-building work that’s defined my entire adult life (take that, Dad!), and because it has created a real generational opening for civic renewal.

But I’m also worried that this connection craze may have a shadow side: connection grift. In the exuberance of the craze, political, social, technological, and cultural entrepreneurs rush in to capitalize on it. These grifters tend to share four key identifiers. First, they often promise to “solve” our “problems” with the tools, practices, models, and ways of being that contributed to these problems in the first place. Second, they often are disconnected from popular constituencies to which they are committed and accountable. Third, they often are able to capture finite resources and power at the expense of individuals and communities. And, fourth, when the dust settles, they often end up reinforcing these problems rather than helping to solve them. Grifters promise us a silver bullet, and leave us a civic life littered with empty shell casings.

I’m writing this piece now because I believe the connection grift has already begun, and it’s a direct threat to our collective project of civic renewal. If we don’t push back, our once-in-a-generation moment of renewal will get captured, money will get wasted, and our communities will be worse for the wear. But I’m also writing this piece now because I believe we still have a window to channel this craze for good: to cultivate a civic future where community members have the agency to shape their individual and collective lives, and where they are enmeshed in overlapping webs of relationships, associations, and commitments to share the joy, wonder, pain, grief, and messiness of the human experience.

In our system where the quick fix and easy buck are rewarded over the long-haul work of durable social change — and where the “politics of spectacle” has displaced the politics of accountability — the line between well-intended opportunism and actual grift is razor thin. That’s why I use the word grift capaciously, albeit imprecisely, in the sections that follow: to show how the opportunistic practices we currently take for granted can do lasting damage to individuals and communities when replicated, craze after craze. My hope is that this piece is a flashlight, a compass, and a companion for the trail: elucidating the big connection grifts we’re currently being sold, providing some direction for what more generative civic possibilities could look like, and inviting you to join me in attempting to stay accountable to the long-haul, generational work of renewal.

Expert Grift: The new friendship “expert” will correct the bad advice that the old self-care “expert” gave.

“There’s this subtle implication that … our need for friendship is an individual-level problem to solve, and that we can only find these things we all deserve for free — friendship and community — if we can pay for it … By virtue of being humans, we know intuitively how to connect and be in community. It makes me mad when it feels as if these ways of connecting have been stolen from us and are being repackaged and sold back to us.” - , “The mysterious, magical, unpredictable human funk of being in community”(2025)

If the 2010s were the decade of expert thought leaders encouraging us to turn inward and focus on self-care, the 2020s are primed to be the decade when these thought leaders encourage us to turn outward and focus on making friends and finding community. They’re already publishing books with titles like How to Know a Person and Find Your People. They will give TED Talks — chock full of pregnant pauses, of course — with headlines like “The Hidden Power of Friendship” and “Stop Networking, Start Connecting” (AI made those up). They will share their “big” ideas on podcasts with hosts who like to whisper gently into their microphones. And some of them will make money — lots of it, too! — from book royalties, speaking fees, corporate consulting engagements, and paid workshops on how to make friends and find community.

This advice to “make friends” and “find community” isn’t necessarily wrong, but self-help expertise like this operates on a fundamentally individualistic, choice-based commercial paradigm that is, itself, part of the problem. Here’s the thing: Making friends and finding community has never been just a choice; it has always required collective scaffolding. As our past research has shown, our ability to access, join, participate in, and make friends in community is largely a structural issue driven by education and class. When thought leaders tell people with limited access to community and no friends to “find your people,” they’re performing the social equivalent of selling get-rich-quick books like Think and Grow Rich and Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. Placing what should be the responsibility of the collective on the individual is a tried and true way to sell books and collect speaking fees. But it is no way to cultivate the communal change or culture of solidarity needed to build a civic life where everyone can actually “find community.”

But experts and cultural entrepreneurs can call us into collective action, and we have powerful examples from recent years to prove it. ’s The Anxious Generation didn’t just tell parents to keep their kids off smartphones and social media, it spurred a movement of policymakers, school leaders, parents, and young people committed to ending the “phone-based childhood.” ’ Of Boys and Men didn’t just tell men to get their shit together, it created the permission structure for policymakers, institutional leaders, and community members to take action to support men and boys. And Join or Die, directed by Rebecca and , didn’t just tell viewers to “join a club,” it kickstarted a movement of gatherers and joiners committed to cultivating civic “membership” in their local communities. Yes, it’s true that these experts, by virtue of their independence, are still not accountable to the constituencies they helped activate. But it’s also true that they have, directly or indirectly, motivated millions of individuals to strengthen connection in their particular places. And they have all done it by creating the cultural scaffolding for collective action.

Technological Grift Heist: The new tech tools will solve the disconnection that the old tech tools accelerated.

“Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image.” - Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)

Our tech entrepreneurs have assured us that they can “solve” the loneliness they helped cause. Sure, the mass scale adoption of social media and smartphones may have contributed to rising rates of isolation and disconnection, but that’s exactly why we need new “scalable” tools to solve these problems. Sure, many people are scrolling alone on their phones in their bedrooms, but that’s exactly why they need the companionship of AI friends and romantic partners. Sure, venture-backed companies need a 10x-plus return to satisfy their investors, but getting rich and solving loneliness is what we call a “win-win.”

But, as I’ve written about before, this is technological grift in its purest form. Without changing the underlying incentive structures of the tools — namely, the funding, ownership, governance, and business models — tech entrepreneurs are simply dressing up old approaches in new clothes. Since the introduction of television, the business model of media companies has been to capture as much of our time and attention as possible, and convert it into their money. Social media and streaming platforms put this model on steroids by adding attention-fracking features built to keep us hooked. Now, AI companions and chatbots designed to mimic human relationships — all without the friction and messiness of actual humans — promise to make social media look quaint. Of course, the big loser in this competition for our time and attention will continue to be our embedded relationships: with our families, with our friends, with our communities, and with the natural world. Perhaps we should call this a technological “heist” instead; the attention, friction, and relationships that make us human are being stolen before our very eyes.

Another way for our tech tools is possible, though, and the dystopian nature of our current technological reality is galvanizing new alternatives. A culture of resisting the machine is taking root: groups like Offline Club are growing in popularity, and bars like Hush Harbor are experimenting with models for phone-free third places. But there are also emergent efforts to repurpose our tech tools for conviviality. Thinkers like Nathan Schneider and groups like the Platform Co-op Consortium are designing new funding and ownership models for tech platforms to be supported, owned, and governed by their members. The Relational Tech Project is cultivating a network of “relational technologists” committed to building “village” and “neighborhood” scale tools that facilitate in-person human relationships. A future where our tech tools are owned and controlled by members and help strengthen relationships in our communities? That’s a real “win-win.”

Political Grift: The new political savior will clean up the civic mess that the old political saviors made.

“Contemporary prophets of the totalitarian community seek … to transmute popular cravings for community into a millennial sense of participation in heavenly power on earth … It becomes a moral community of almost religious intensity, a deeply evocative symbol of collective, redemptive purpose, a passion that implicates every element of belief and behavior in the individual’s existence.” - Robert Nesbit, The Quest for Community (1953)

Every four years, we’re asked to place our faith in a presidential candidate to be our political savior. In 2008, Obama made himself the face of “hope” and “change.” In 2016, Trump famously declared, “I, alone, can fix it.” Assuming there’s an election in 2028 (what a fun clause to write!), I’d bet that we’ll see candidates running on more explicitly connection-focused platforms. Chris Murphy may run on a platform of combating loneliness and isolation. Wes Moore may run on a platform of promoting service and purpose. Spencer Cox may run on a platform of spiritual and moral renewal. JD Vance may run on a platform of “place” and “heritage.” They’ll collectively raise billions of dollars, in part, on these platforms of communal and civic renewal.

But our national political leaders cannot save our communities, and they know it. When they ask us to put our faith in them as our source of salvation, all they’re doing is seizing on the lack of belonging, meaning, and agency we feel in our day-to-day lives, and translating it to campaign donations and power. The problem is not just how awful [insert last political savior here] was, the problem is also our need for political saviors in the first place. In a flourishing democracy — built on overlapping webs of relationships, memberships, and associations, and where we see ourselves as agents of change in our own communities — voting for national politicians would be the final expression of our will to affect societal change, not the sole expression of that will. But we’re not living in a flourishing democracy; we’re living in a desiccated one. And that means we’re asked to transactionally donate to and vote for our next political savior as if we’re shopping on Amazon, and then pray they act in our best interest.

If Murphy, Moore, Cox, or any other civically inclined front-runner is serious about their civic commitments, they need to completely upend how we do Presidential politics. Imagine if, during the campaign, they ran on an intentionally participatory platform. Instead of concentrating power in the national party, they could commit to rebuilding active membership in local party chapters and committees nationwide. Instead of hosting closed-door meetings with mega-donors, they could host thousands of civic parties across the country. Instead of raising hundreds of millions of dollars for ad buys, they could use the mass attentional event of a Presidential election to redirect money and energy to local non-partisan civic groups. Then, in their first 100 days as President, imagine if they called us into 100 acts of local civic participation. One week could be for potluck dinners with neighbors. The next week could be for block parties, cookouts, and barbecues. Another week could be for neighborhood clean-ups and improvement projects. Yes, all of this is very weird. But if our national political leaders are committed to helping us recover our local civic agency, they may need to apply the Doug Rushkoff theory of change, where “embracing the weird” is the first step toward “triggering agency” and “resocializing people.”

Civic Grift: The new national nonprofits will fix the problems that the old national nonprofits helped create.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience …” - C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (1970)

Disconnection and civic decline may be a problem, but worry not: A new suite of national nonprofits are here to save us. Led by professional managers based out of coastal cities, these nonprofits are committed to designing the perfect programs to “scale,” the perfect measures to assess their “impact,” and the perfect “convenings” to “field build.” They’re raising tons of money from big philanthropic funders who are suddenly building “civic infrastructure” strategies and exploring the “connection and belonging” space. And, ready or not, they’re coming to a community near you!

This is civic grift, plain and simple, and it may be the most pernicious grift of all. It wraps itself in the veneer of doing good, hoards significant resources and influence, then proceeds to reinforce practices, models, and forms that have done real harm to communities. By building a new set of national nonprofits led by distant managers, governed by distant boards, supported by distant funders, and validated by distant measures, these social entrepreneurs are replicating the very corporatized, top-down, managerial, and technocratic structures that squeezed the life out of civic life in the first place. And by capturing finite funding for their national organizations, they are directly siphoning off resources that could be going to place-based groups and proximate leaders. Of course, because they are neither embedded in nor committed and accountable to local communities, when connection loses its sexiness and funding dries up, they can just move on to the next craze. Grift, rinse, repeat.

But we can all take a page out of D.A.R.E.’s book and just say no to civic opportunism and grift. Local groups and leaders can commit to reducing their dependency on distant, unaccountable funders by experimenting with ways to realign their membership, revenue, and governance. These same local groups and leaders can also commit to building their own power and influence. Instead of waiting for a national nonprofit or philanthropy to organize them, they can form self-governing networks of locally-rooted practitioners who are connected across place and bound together by a set of shared principles for the civic future they imagine. Funders can commit to investing directly in these locally rooted groups and their self-governing networks — rather than national groups and top-down field-building efforts — and commit to supporting experimentation toward long-term civic realignment and renewal. Make no mistake: This is difficult, slow, generational work. But the alternative is what Wendell Berry would call “the way of ignorance”: continuing to replicate the distant, extractive, and unaccountable institutional forms and models that contributed to the “diminished democracy” we experience today.

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Perhaps more pertinent for this newsletter, October also m…

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I’ve gotten to know Elizabeth throughout the past year, and I’ve found that I leave each of our conversations with at least three new reframes for how I think about spirituality, relationship, and community. This latest conversation between Elizabeth, me, and was no different. We explored her idea of “friendship” as her “theory of change.” We discussed how and why we must account for the “sinfulness of the human heart” in relationships and community. We interrogated the possibilities and limits of policy to create the conditions for connection — the “unavoidably spiritual” thing that “we are most made for.” And we collectively asked: what must we do, and how must we be?

If you’ve been asking questions about both the civic and the sacred, this Q&A is for you. If you’ve been wrestling with the tensions between inner change and collective formation, this Q&A is for you. If you’re looking for a healthy dose of spirit and aliveness this morning, this Q&A is for you.

Please consider giving it a read. And if you want to continue engaging with Elizabeth’s work, subscribe to her newsletter, follow the podcast, and buy the book.

- Sam P.

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Sam Pressler (SP): The last time we spoke, you described “friendship” as your “theory of change.” It’s an evocative phrase, and feels like a good place to start. What do you mean by that?

My core interest revolves around the question: How can we effectively communicate? I’m obsessed with our ability as humans to encounter each other — to really encounter each other — because that feels like what we’re made for. It’s our deepest longing.

So I started paying attention to relationships in general, and particularly to those moments when we’re effectively able to meet each other, to speak, and to be understood. I was working in the social sector and we were all obsessed with these questions of: “How does change happen? Is it top-down? Is it bottom-up?” But I had this hunch that the way we change is through relationships where we feel safe, and that we can only learn anything new because someone we trust is teaching it to us.

Then this friend of mine, Sarah Stein Lubrano, wrote this book called Don’t Talk About Politics, and what she concluded is the only way anyone changes their minds is through their friends. It is in these little networks of respect and affection that our brain can get out of self-protective mode and experience reality, learn, and grow.

It has just become more and more obvious to me: If you want to change the world, you have to be a relationship ninja and come to care for the people whose minds, behaviors, and lives you’re trying to change.

Sam Wolf (SW): How do you really get into that mindset? It often feels like the cultural, political, and economic currents push so hard in the other direction — away from friendship and relationship as a theory of change — that even with a lot of intentional effort, it’s very difficult to root into that way of being.

I’m nervous about the word “scale,” but how do you teach this? Because it’s not just about learning the theory. I have days where I fully understand the theory and I’m still full of rage and contempt — and I’m probably making things worse. The question is: How do you get it in your bloodstream sufficiently to adopt a mindset in ways that people can see in you?

The fact that it’s essentially a commandment in my tradition helps. Jesus is incredibly astute about how people work and is such an interesting disruptor of tribes and purity lines. He’s always going to the edges. He’s always going to whoever is the person in the room that everyone else hates and making a connection with them. He doesn’t necessarily affirm everything about them — often, he does not — but he sees people in this remarkable way. Take Zacchaeus, for instance, the tax collector up a tree who is hiding because he’s so ashamed. Jesus is like, “I see you. I see you.”

So I have this gift of being part of this tradition with all these spiritual practices. And what does a healthy spiritual practice do? It takes an idea, and through ritual and structures of attention and collective practice — each of which employs our bodies and our imaginations and our stories — we’re encouraged to keep coming back to that central idea. I live amongst an intentional community of people who are also committed to loving their neighbors and their enemies. I don’t get to rule anyone outside the tent. God has said that he loves my enemies, and I am called to love them, too.

This practice of spiritual formation is, in part, like a muscle we have to build. The Civil Rights Movement knew this. They did so much role playing, like: “This is going to happen to you. Your body’s going to react like this. How do you turn the other cheek?” If we are committed to the full humanity of other people, how do we actually love them? How do we seek their good in the moments that are hardest? It’s not going to come naturally. We need to form new habits, and that’s just commitment over time: It’s doing it again and failing and then trying yet again.

SP: I’ve genuinely appreciated your reflections on living in an intentional Christian community. It strikes me that you’re living into one of the questions that animates you most — that is, what is the interaction between inner change and collective formation? I’m curious: How would you begin to answer that question today?

I have days where I’m really radical and I’m like: “Everything is pointless unless it’s collective. There is no such thing as individuals. We are wasting time alone in our rooms, reading books and listening to podcasts and meditating by ourselves. Screw that.”

But I don’t think that way every day, because the great wisdom traditions seem to hold both the individual and the collective. There is a personal path (and responsibility) for particular souls to become the kind of person that is useful in these times. Some of that I can do alone. But because friendship is my theory of change, I believe we change most effectively, most rapidly, and, at times, most intentionally, with others.

That’s one of the reasons why we moved into intentional community: I was craving a collective scaffolding for my formation. We are made for each other, but society is not set up for that. So we needed to huddle up in ways that were countercultural and required some covenant commitments of us and our time — some quite sacrificial — to have any hope in hell of becoming of use to one another.

I am often trying to say to people, “Yes, other people are annoying. Yes, congregations or clubs or societies will not adapt to your preferences. Yes, all of this requires sacrifice, and it’s a ball-ache, and you have to go to things when you don’t want to. But there is no other way. Suck it up.” We are relational creatures trying to live as if we’re not, and it’s killing us.

SP: Let’s go a little deeper on that: Can you give a little bit of the texture of what it looks like, feels like, smells like to live in an intentional Christian community? How are you being held in that? How are you being challenged in that?

There are seven of us at the moment in what is essentially an 1,800 square foot house. Americans are absolutely horrified about this. But for London, it’s a big family home, and there are a lot of us. We have our own bedrooms, but otherwise all the space is shared, which is a source of formation in itself.

We have what is often known as a “Rule of Life,” which is what the monks called it. “Rule” essentially means a ruler or a measuring stick; it’s not a law that you can break. We have decided who we want to become collectively: our principles and values and ethos. Then we have organized our time, our choices, and our attention to make it more likely that we live by these principles and values. For example, we wanted to be prayerful, so we pray together three mornings a week at 6:45 AM. I loathe and detest this ritual with every cell in my being, and I’m always grateful I’ve done it afterward.

We have a house night where we invest in our relationships. We have an admin meeting. We have a once-a-month day of fun, because we’ve found that we have to match the amount of admin we do with the amount of fun we have. You can have more fun than admin, just don’t let it go the other way.

If you add all that up, we’re spending a solid eight hours a week together, which is a lot of your life to commit to other people. Not everyone does intentional community like us; in fact, there are all kinds of ways you can do it. But here’s what’s essential to making it work: You have decided with a group of people how you want to be growing up your souls in the world, you have sacrificed other options to prioritize those things, and you hold each other accountable to these priorities, because it’s much easier to do if there’s a small amount of social pressure.

SW: It strikes me that it’s a Christian community, and a lot of what you’re talking about, like commitment, sacrifice, and prayer, can be very religious things. Do you think that community on its own is enough — coming together with other people and connecting socially, for instance — or does it need to be grounded in tradition, transcendence, or something that looks and feels a little bit more spiritual?

I’m very skeptical about community for the sake of community. If what is driving you together in the first place is loneliness, and then things get hard, and in that relationship you start feeling lonely because it’s hard, then what is holding you together?

Over history, necessity is what held us together: We needed each other. In a community, you had a mix of skills, and you shared those skills. When the hurricane came, you fixed each other’s barns. You couldn’t survive without each other.

There was a huge flowering of intentional communities in the 60s and 70s. They were gathered around some really big ideas, too. But they didn’t have a particularly realistic understanding of human nature. They weren’t accounting for power dynamics. They weren’t accounting for discomfort. They weren’t accounting for, in my language, “the sinfulness of the human heart.” So they didn’t hold; often, they catastrophically imploded.

Big ideas are essential though: Without a big idea — without a third thing — it’s really difficult to navigate the hard times. It doesn’t have to be religion. I’ve got some friends who are polyamorous and are very committed to the idea of reimagining the family. There’s a liberatory Marxist politics that they are working on together, and that’s enough to hold them. Unless there is a reason for you to surrender some of your preferences and compromise in the moment for the good of the other — unless you’ve got a strong story about why you should make these sacrifices — you won’t be able to do it.

Community doesn’t work under individualism. Unless you have something that is pushing back on individualism, it won’t work. It will just be a house share like Airbnb, or something else the market is selling you and calling “community.”

SP: You just used this phrase, “The sinfulness of the human heart.” You don’t hear that too much in polite modern life. I talk to a lot of people, and I’m pretty certain you’re the only one who brings it up. So what does sin have to do with it?

How did I become the sin woman? That was a swerve.

Disclaimer: I’m a self-taught theologian. There will be many Christians who disagree with me, but I understand and define sin as disconnection. My understanding of the Christian anthropology is that we are not individuals, but persons made for relationship. People get that from the Trinity. People get that from Genesis. We are made for relationship with God and with each other; that is what it means to be fully alive.

When someone asked Jesus, “Can you sum up the whole law?” He says, “Love the Lord your God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” These horizontal and vertical relationships are the ball game. Full aliveness is living into right relationship with our own souls — actually listening to our deepest longings and not our surface-level cravings which mislead us. Full aliveness is living into right relationship with other people. Full aliveness is living into right relationship with the Earth and Creation — which we have all so massively fucked up — and with God.

The reason we are interested in this whole topic, and your whole newsletter exists, and all my work exists, is that we are made for more community and more relationships than we currently have. There are some systemic reasons that we don’t have these relationships, and there are some reasons that are entirely our own fault. The other definition of sin that both Luther and Augustine used is “homo incurvatus in se,” which means “humanity turned in on itself.” And that’s what I mean by sin: We’ve turned in on ourselves, when we are made to grow out towards each other.

SP: The way you talk about sin seems to be accompanied by a dose of grace and forgiveness.

My definition of sin is not loaded with shame and guilt. It is a way of naming tendencies in ourselves — tendencies that are physically and spiritually part of ourselves — which trip us up and stop us from being fully alive. This contrasts with the story we get sold in our culture: that we’re fundamentally good people if we could just deal with some of our bad patterns. So I find the concept of sin quite psychologically realistic and relieving.

I mainly think about sin in relation to myself. We’ve had a new housemate move in. I was annoyed that I couldn’t get into the bathroom to brush my teeth when I needed to. I was stomping all over the house and feeling resentful of this housemate who had no idea about what I wanted. I needed to build up the courage to have the conversation about it; I needed to be vulnerable enough to experience the slight relational friction and be like, “Can we figure this out together?” But I just wanted my preferences. I was like, “I want someone to magically know what I need and the world to adapt to my preferences. And why the hell is it not doing so?”

Because I believe in the possibility of grace and forgiveness, I can go, “Oh, hi tiny, confused inner child. What do you need? You need forgiveness, you need to find steadiness, and then you need to grow past it.” If what you get is shame and guilt, which is exactly how it’s communicated in some parts of the church, then that just can lead to ever more disconnection. When you continue to hide those bits of yourself, you never bring them into the light and you never move past them into connection.

SP: How is what you’re describing with sin and grace different from what modern therapy culture sells us in terms of self-love and self-care, especially as we reflect on ourselves in relationship to community?

I’ll start with a caveat: There are incredibly healthy and humane forms of therapy that I and others have benefited from. But most therapy is working on a fundamentally individualistic anthropology.

I’m going to say something that I don’t know if I fully believe, because it’s the first time I’ve articulated it: I don’t believe in self-love. I think love is a relational concept. As John Vervaeke says, “Meaning is a relational concept.” I don’t believe you can make your own meaning. We only can make it collectively. We can receive love from other people and then remind ourselves of that love from other people in moments where we’re feeling sore and sad. But if you have received no love from anyone ever, of course you cannot love yourself. This is something we receive and give to each other.

We can access self-compassion and kindness, but those are taught. They are received. Ultimately, as someone who believes in God, I believe the love that we’re seeking is in God; then, we have it refracted and reflected through others. But insofar as therapy actually doesn’t understand humans as relational and is working on tiny little parts of the system — which not all of the schools of therapy are — it’s maybe helpful, but not sufficient.

SW: This conversation is more spiritual than many we have here at Connective Tissue. What is the connection between the spiritual, sacred conversation we’re having and the civic, political situation that we’re in? Do you see those two universes as the same universe? Is there more overlap that’s needed?

Absolutely. It’s different language for the same thing. Policy language is useful when you’re designing systems and you’re trying to allocate funding, but it is essentially a mirage, right?

The deep longing of the human heart to see and be seen and know and be known is unavoidably spiritual, and that is why we want there to be a thriving civic infrastructure in our neighborhood. We want to be able to show up somewhere and have someone say, “It’s really nice to see you. We missed you last week.” That might involve the need for physical space or funding, or people not being so caught up in hustle culture that they have enough time to go to choir. But all of these things are scaffolding and the creation of conditions — this is giving me goosebumps — for us to get to do the thing that we were made for.

So I both want to cheer on and celebrate the people trying to create the civic infrastructure, and say, “Don’t forget what this is really about — this tender, uncontrollable, vulnerable humanness underneath it.” Sometimes, those things can get disconnected, and then even in the attempts to create the conditions for the full aliveness that we long for, everything just becomes professionalized and controlled and bureaucratic. If that happens, have we actually done any good in the world?

SP: This brings up a tension I’m wrestling with right now. Your response is pointing to our need for collective spiritual transformation as individuals — to see that we belong to one another. But what can create this collective spiritual turn amidst a culture of hyper-individualism, isolation, and techno-materialism that tells us our humanity is replaceable?

Maybe the answer is: “There is no answer.” Maybe the desire to facilitate this spiritual shift is an attempt to exert control over something that cannot be controlled. But what then must we do? Or, perhaps better put: How then must we be?

It’s not an accident that I started off at the BBC thinking that I could get my hand on the levers of culture, and then I ran a think tank believing I could shift the policy landscape, and now I just live in a commune. I am slightly at the end of myself on this scalable change question, other than these ideas like John Berger’s “pockets of sanity“ or John Paul Lederach’s “critical yeast.” It’s these metaphors that point to how change happens that’s small and relational and local, and then ripples outwards. So what is the work that is asked of us? It’s personal, and in our families, and in our communities, and in our networks.

My best guess right now is to loudly and unashamedly tell a different story. It is to be prepared to be the weirdo who says things like, “Sin might be helpful,” and “There’s no such thing as self-care or self-love.” And then, it is to doggedly — and, ideally, slightly playfully — wave a flag for a possible different logic and a possible different kingdom, and try to live it with steadily reducing levels of hypocrisy.

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