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A coworking space is not a community. A subscriber list is not a community. A hundred one-on-one coffees is not a community—that’s just a practice. Now when those coffees recur, or we begin to host meetups, or those folks begin sharing resources with each other… then we might be onto something. Just as friendship requires an ongoing investment and repeatedly showing up—so does a community.
I’m still processing the election (as I’m sure many of us are). I appreciated Carly’s call to intentionally build community. Would more dinner parties in 2024 have changed the outcome of an election? I doubt it, but I don’t think it would have hurt.
Start where you are, with what you have, with who you know. Build slowly and intentionally.
Connecting with people will be an intention for me in the coming year.
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On the same theme as my own reflection on the election, friend Naz Hamid has written a piece that’s well worth your time. A brief excerpt:
“The feeling of disbelief is a privilege.
“I’m not surprised. Disappointed and angry, yes. But not surprised. I’ve experienced racism enough times in this country and gone through a lengthy process with immigration to know what this country truly is. Ironically, the racism I’ve experienced has occurred in cities. And despite being heightened to it when traveling through smaller parts of this country, I haven’t knowingly experienced it. The racism is here, in our backyards.
“But this country is unlike any other. There are good people here, aiming to truly make the world a better place.”
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“If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system. And we change the system by making everyone involved, especially those in authority, feel urgency about changing the real-world impacts that a system has.”
Yes, yes! 🤌🏼
And this follow-on:
“In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks that I grew up around and spent the first decades of my life amongst.”
To be an unwitting systems observer (how I feel, not Anil’s term) is to be virtually incapable of seeing the way the systems around us define our lives and experience. It’s at the core of a recent article, and his experience of indifferent moderatism in the suburban core resonates significantly with my own experience growing up in the suburbs. When the systems are built for you, you tend to think of them as natural and immutable in the way a religious person might just assume their perfect deity deigned them to be so.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we build meaning in our lives and this speech by John W. Gardner nails it:
“You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.”
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Scott Belsky’s newsletter is worth the subscribe. I wanted to particularly call out his commentary on “collapsing the talent stack”. This tracks with how I also imagine AI will affect the design/product industry. We will see less niched titles doing micro tasks and more generalists. I’m not saying this is bad or good (I can make arguments in both directions), but business is going to expect increasingly-more from those of us that help craft product interfaces and feature roadmaps.
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This piece is already several month’s old, and it may not age well, but I suspect some element of the “snake eats tail” effect is unavoidable at both a technical and (more importantly) cultural level. Yes, everything is a remix, but what if the remix is increasingly limited, boring, and factually inaccurate?
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Lake Powell was always a fools errand. It hasn’t been at capacity in decades, and only rarely since its inception. It’s time to let it go and allow nature to restore the beautiful canyons and indigenous cultural sites that have long been covered.
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Heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. Please give it a read.
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Excellent reporting from Alissa Walker. It wouldn’t take much for most of us to substitute trips by any other mode for a few of our car trips, but the problem is that we think we don’t need to.
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Anxy’s Masculinity Issue is my first exposure to Anxy and it’s beautifully assembled.
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Recommended to me by my sister, this book gave me a fresh perspective on the Four Corners region of the American Southwest and the ancestors of the indigenous Puebloan peoples.