Community, love, connection: a tonic for darkening times

How do we maintain sanity in the reality of today?

It’s been a week huh?! Musk, neo nazi salutes, the emergence of a new oligarchy… It’s not that I didn’t feel that something of this magnitude was coming, but my complete lack of cognition has taken me by surprise. I can read the news, observe the actions, and engage with the memes, but my brain won’t allow me to accept it to be true. How are you faring against the incomprehensible right now?

I was whisked away to the middle of the bush last week and reminded that respite is necessary when our daily pursuits place us amongst the mess of it all. I spent hours sitting and staring at giant gum trees… their leaves, the sunlight hitting them, their precious dance in the breeze, their twisted and battered branches, their visitors. I pondered the wisdom they held inside. I wondered what horrors and what beauty they may have seen.

At night I was treated to a display by the planets while the sun went to bed. I became entirely enamoured with one particular planet (which I’m pretty sure was Venus) and felt a calm in my body that hadn’t been present in months. In finding a synergistic relationship with my surroundings again, I was humbled by my insignificance.

Only here, surrounded by the raw beauty of nature, could I begin to meet the painful reality my brain had been trying so hard to avoid. Sadly. This shit is real.

But how do we maintain sanity in this “brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible”¹ world we find ourselves in without running away to the bush every week?

It’s a question I’ve been asking good friends and mentors, and exploring in the content I’ve been consuming. Here is where I have landed: in a world where the odds are stacked in favour of division and hate, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is defiantly choose community, love and connection.

“Today, we are faced with a profound choice. Do we continue with the status quo, marked by pain, disconnection, and division? Or do we choose a different path - one of joy, health, and fulfilment where we turn toward each other instead of away from each other, where we choose love over fear, where we recognize community as the irreplaceable foundation for our well-being?”

This is the message shared by outgoing US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy earlier this month in his parting prescription to America.

His final wish for us all?

“Choose community”

According to Murthy, without a connection to something bigger than individual pursuits it is almost impossible to rise to societal-level challenges (and we’ve got a bunch of those to work on right now). This is because disconnection leaves us vulnerable to illness and despair at a personal level. At a societal level it breeds pessimism and distrust. While this mutual despair, distrust and pessimism can sometimes unite us, I believe that we need trust, intimacy and stubborn optimism to sustain our efforts.

“Community is a powerful source of life satisfaction and life expectancy. It’s where we know each other, help each other, and find purpose in contributing to each other’s lives.”

In this prescription, Murthy explains that community is a multiplier of the good stuff. He credits connection to communities with lower rates of heart disease, early mortality, dementia, depression, and anxiety. He describes community as having three pillars: relationships, service, and purpose. Together, these three pillars form what he calls a “Triad of Fulfillment.” He argues that by shifting toward seeking fulfilment over individual success, we can fundamentally address our collective ills.

In my own experience, community has been a space for me to heal from trauma and pain and to address my tendency for hyper-independence. I wrote about it recently for Finding Nature.

I find community: at my local cafe where I connect with my neighbours over dog talk and coffee; in my personal trainer’s home garage which offers a safe space for women to build mental and physical strength; with the people in my author’s community who I’m learning to write alongside; through mentorship and with peers; and with the good humans who co-work with me every month at The Good Cartel Collective here in Melbourne. Where do you find community?

Choose love

The next concept Murthy’s prescription discusses is the “core virtue” of love. He explains that combining love with community creates “an ecosystem for meaning and belonging”. Murthy describes love as a “commanding force with power to build, strengthen and heal”. Just feeling into this soothes the soul. Do you agree?

To explain why this resonates so strongly, I need to take you for a walk in my neighbourhood where all the streets are named after famous poets: Wordsworth, Milton, Ruskin, Byron, Tennyson and others. The words of these poets are stencilled on light posts and power boxes, under street signs and beside bus stops. I’ve always appreciated this small but beautiful gesture. Yesterday on my morning walk, I was presented with the words: “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. You might recognise it as a line from a much larger piece by Lord Tennyson written as an elegy to a dear friend who died suddenly and an expression of the grief that followed for Tennyson.

In these darkening times, Tennyson’s words have a different resonance for me. Yes, they are an invitation to accept the inevitability of a broken heart as a consequence of life well-lived. But they also offered me a way to surface and reckon with a fundamental choice we face.

It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve begun to accept that we have already, and are going to continue to, lose… we are going to lose a lot. The science is not only conclusive, it’s playing out in reality - the latest fires in LA in the middle of winter and the surrender of democracy to oligarchy are just the most recent examples of loss. We’ve hit and exceeded critical tipping points. The time for proactive adaptation is shrinking. I believe we are increasingly going to be forced to adapt. It’s no longer a race against time, but one against the reality unfolding before our eyes.

So with Tennyson’s wisdom in the back of my mind, it rings clear (in my view) that this is not a choice about whether or not to accept the loss. The choice is about how we choose to be and show up in the world despite that loss: to choose love or not. For me, the decision isn’t hard: I choose love because tis indeed better to have loved despite the loss we will face than to engage passively (let alone actively) in our troubling spiral toward division.

Murthy, Tennyson and I are not alone in reaching this conclusion. Sarah Wilson and her co-conspirators have been slowly but surely moving toward this conclusion in the book serialisation project on collapse. Sarah and her 50,000+ strong Substack audience have been bravely traversing through topics like hope, truth, collapse theory, metacrisis, zero-sum games. They have questioned how we can live through it all and they’ve landed on love as well. (You can access the chapter on love for free here.)

But how do we engage with love beyond the feeling and into something active?

Choose connection

My hunch is that we have to commit to prioritising meaningful connection with each other and to make that happen, we’re going to have to lean into humility, curiosity, vulnerability and intent.

I introduced a series of stories here called Critical connections about a year ago. It was inspired by Adrienne Maree Brown’s book, Emergent Strategy, and her call to “emphasise critical connection over critical mass”. The series was an attempt to understand through reflection on my relationships how small meaningful interactions with other humans can have positive ripple effects. It was humbling to step back from being in relation with others and instead observe how I relate to others. I learned that my fears and anxieties were sabotaging meaningful connection with others. I also learned that when I was willing to be curious about others’ opinions and vulnerable enough to trust strangers, the depth of my relationships increased exponentially.

Since then, I’ve discovered a whole movement of humans craving a more interrelated way of being:

• There’s Swedish Academic and TV host, Emma Stenström’s method of “bubble hopping” which she describes as a concrete plan of action to actively expose ourselves to new social contexts and seek new perspectives regularly. Essentially she advocates for adopting a deep and intentional curiosity as an antidote to social division.

• The Offline Club which originated in Amsterdam is another example of people making an intentional choice to choose deeper, face-to-face, connection with others over shallow interactions online. The Offline Club offers device-free events in cities around the world where you can turn up and focus on quality interactions with other people.

• Margaret Wheatley’s latest book, Restoring Sanity, offers a set of practices to foster meaningful work by creating supporting communities that provide protection from our destructive external environment. She calls these communities “Islands of Sanity”.

• Additionally, collectives of like-minded humans are responding to the call for connection with generous invitations to create the conditions we need for better futures - the Collective Futurecrafting movement is one such example.

It is no wonder we crave this type of connection. In his parting prescription Murthy lists joy, support, sense-making, stress buffers and improved performance as just some of the benefits of healthy relationships.

In my heart, I feel a deep desire to engage in intimate dialogue and be connected with others right now. I want to find kinder ways to share our ideas. By this I mean I wish to go beyond creation for self-affirmation and create to invite commune and dialogue. What is it that your heart yearns for?

How do we access this kind of connection in a world where many of us find it easier to remain glued to the screens on our phones than to look up and say hello to a neighbour on our way in the front door?

Craving connection and having the intent to connect is not enough in itself, we also need physical spaces to facilitate those connections. In a society where Murthy observes we are moving a lot, spending more time at work, participating less in civil life and more in social media, the infrastructure to encourage relationships becomes a critical factor in fostering open and generous dialogue with each other.

I listened to a podcast recently with American sociologist Eric Klinenberg. He observes that most public and work spaces today are hardwired for efficiency and consumption - “the enemy of social life”. He suggests that just as we invest in physical infrastructure like roads, technology and buildings, we should also invest in social infrastructure. Further, when we do, we build more resilient communities.

This has been true in my own experience since founding The Good Cartel Collective. A simple offer of a space once a month to come together with other humans to connect has resulted in smaller cooperatives forming, new faces arriving every month and a solid cohort of repeat offenders. This year we are even trialling long lunches and dinners because the break times on our co-working days never feel long enough!

What other types of social infrastructure do you wish you had access to? What is it that you need to cultivate meaningful connections? How can we create it together? I’d love for you to share your thoughts in the comments below.

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So brave humans, I hope that you can also find some tonic in this offering to choose community, love and connection in the dark times ahead. To help you get there, I leave you with these three beautiful questions prescribed by Dr Murthy for us all to reflect on.

1. With whom can I connect with more deeply?

2. What can I do to help others?

3. What gives my life meaning?

1. BANI Framework by Jamais Cascio (https://medium.com/@cascio/human-responses-to-a-bani-world-fb3a296e9cac)