* This is part two of a series. Read the first part here.
It’s not enough to be generous and kind with our friends and family. We must also be willing to extend compassion into our communities. As we creep towards a more insular existence, focused on nurturing our tribes exclusively, we are unwittingly encouraging the polarization of society.
I’ll be honest, though it will make me sound really old, I miss the days in childhood (link about driving up dad’s old driveway after he passed) when my awareness of the world was limited to a three-block radius. I miss knowing all my neighbors, even the crazy ones, and making space in my heart for their quirks. I miss getting excited about the mundane news of the day – like whose house was serving grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch or if Jon had been brave enough to pee on the electric fence.
We lose something when our communities become scrupulously curated. When we base our standards for real life on unnatural photo filters, selectively staged moments, and heavily edited phrases, we perpetuate a mindset that craves perfection. The flip side of this craving is a feeling of being eternally inadequate.
We lose something deeply human when we subscribe to a social paradigm where we can unfriend people we disagree with, narrow our scope of awareness to that which supports our already held beliefs, and remain unchecked in expressing our anger and hate.
Community.
Communities aren’t born from perfect relationships where everyone gets along. They’re gritty and messy and require effort to maintain. And it’s that grit – the unfiltered raw relationships and conflicts that arise – that play a vital role in how society evolves. Because it’s as a result of these exchanges that we learn how to compromise, cooperate, trust, and forgive – human qualities that we need a great deal more of in this world.
We’ve all been there.
My family wasn’t always well received – in the places we lived or visited. There’s more than a handful of negative stories I could share about growing up in a predominantly Caucasian logging town, my father a paraplegic and well-known National Park ranger, with two adopted kids of assorted brown-ness.
But I also have several stories of unexpected connections that we made with community members of seemingly opposing viewpoints. Growing up in a small community where I couldn’t leave the house without running into someone I knew, everyone had skin in the game.
Because of this interdependence and vulnerability, investment in each other grew despite our differences.
Social media demands very little investment, and while it’s not impossible to create genuine connections via our screens, the lack of a tangible component alters the experience dramatically. Without a need to compromise, cooperate, reconcile, or even tolerate differences, we’re losing the very skills we need to build peaceful, compassionate communities.
Nothing about social media can replace the benefits of belonging to tangible communities. Sure, there’s bound to be individuals we disagree with or even view as some sort of “other.” Still, the very nature of living in proximity to one another in a shared space requires us to connect and find ways to live amicably.
We must be thoughtful about how we choose to connect – online and in person. The kind attention we put into our communities will most certainly play a vital role in our survival.
Heads down and phones out — most of us are oblivious to the world around us, including our fellow human beings. That’s why smiling, holding doors, and saying hello to strangers are such powerful gestures.
Mike Thompson
I recognize that social media is here to stay, and by no means am I trying to suggest it’s inherently evil. But if we continue to look to social media as a baseline for how our relationships and communities “should look,” we will continue to eliminate opportunities to work through friction, postponing our development in areas of reconciliation, compassion, and tolerance.
As the adage states, let’s prioritize quality over quantity. By all means, use social media. I will. But use it intentionally, with caution, and only let it account for a small fraction of your time in comparison to your experiences in the 3D world. That’s where real people exist in multiple dimensions, with more in common with one another than we could ever comprehend from behind a screen.
And that’s where we will find deep and valuable meaning in life.
Click play and listen to this article. Read by Anon Gray.
