Is This Life About Community or Independence?
I dodged a question or two on a recent podcast. Time to answer the hard one.
A big thank you to the crew at the Hotel Bar Sessions podcast (check out that Patreon!) for having me on their most recent episode to talk about living off-grid, what exactly we mean by “off-grid,” decentralization, community, and the minor issue of fixing the world.
It was a fun and challenging conversation and, of course, it left me with a list of things I wish I had said in the moment. Johanna also had a list of her own. My wife would prefer I talk a little bit more about how we seek to build stronger local communities versus focusing as much as I do on becoming more independent.
At one point the HBS hosts also asked me about this key tension between independence and community. I didn’t really answer the question and got sidetracked on some digression about balance and my carbon footprint. So let’s try that again.
The truth is I have always yearned for and taken some pretty big steps to build a stronger community around us. My suburban upbringing could feel a little alienating at times and I always romanticized a more small town life. My first journalism job out of college landed me in a very small village in Alaska where Jo and I met and we’ve lived in rural America ever since. Over the years I’ve tried to get involved, from covering local news, starting up new community radio programs, writing grants for local cultural programs, launching a hyperlocal blog, sitting on non-profit boards, joining the local search and rescue team and one very long journey starting a new public charter school.
These projects and efforts produced decidedly mixed results and experiences. I produced some work I’m proud of, made some great friends and had a small but positive impact on some places where it was needed. A few of these initiatives fell flat, didn’t pan out or became over-run with drama. Most painfully, the charter school was only open for a few years before succumbing to the dysfunctional side of small towns, public bureaucracies and a fair amount of naivete on the part of myself and our tiny team.
Lots of lessons were learned, and perhaps the biggest one for me was to be a bit more selective about which quests to take up and more realistic about my own strengths and limitations.
So yea, maybe I’m just a bit more jaded about the potential of community than I was in my 20s and 30s. The pandemic was an opportunity to lean into independence and cultivate my personal skillsets a little bit more, and it’s been pretty great, really.
As I’ve grown older I no longer have much tolerance or energy for the drama that come with just about any kind of community, but at the same time, the positive aspects of community and interpersonal connection seem to be an obvious antidote to the twin social crises of our time: alienation and polarization.
So how can an anxious introvert who spends so much time focused on becoming more independent honestly make community building part of his spiel for fixing what ails society?
By definition, independence leads to abundance. The independence-minded are naturally focused on making sure they have more than enough to get by — that’s kind of the whole point of not having to rely on anyone else. This is the kind of person you want to be in community with when things go sideways. Ideally I guess I think of independence as a prerequisite for being an actual valuable member of a community. Being able to confidently take care of yourself and your own can free you up to be able to take care of others. That’s what I used to imagine small town life would be like when I romanticized while still sitting in my parents’ suburban basement not knowing where I fit in the world.
It’s usually much more complicated than that, with plenty of room for disagreement and drama around how we should best strive to take care of each there in a community, as I’ve discovered over the past two decades.
But there are days where I see glimpses of a better way. I think about the very real (and very misunderstood) crypto, web3 and DAO communities I’ve become part of over the past half-decade, especially the JournoDAO crew that boasts a very rare abundance of both integrity and laughter. We are still so, so early.
I’ll spare the non-initiated the crypto talk here, but certainly countless people have found similar glimpses in other online communities. Substack, in particular, has felt like a confederation of sane refuges in recent years to cool off from the relentless heat of both online dumspter fires and very real wildfires.
So yes, I want to be off-grid and independent and I want to be an integral part of a flourishing community. Multiple flourishing communities, actually. Perhaps we’ll all be citizens of multiple Network States someday soon. Maybe one is emerging right here.
There was one day a couple years ago that felt to me like the way it should/could be. The day started with a Search and Rescue mission in a neighboring community that had a positive outcome, and I was able to catch up with some of my teammates on their lives and other community projects on the drive there and back. I had a great session online with my JournoDAO crew later in the day, a wonderful meal out with friends and family and capped it all with a sunset bike ride.
I stopped on the top of a ridge and watched the sun disappear, feeling as though I had spent at least one day on Earth correctly without a minute wasted. And though I was alone at that moment, I also felt at home in my community. All of them.