**To our nonbinary friends, please read this piece with whatever pronouns and partnerships are yours. Everyone is welcome here.**

Dear reader, I hope for your sake you are not dating these days. I hope you are in a loving and stable relationship that will keep you far away from the apps and ennui of modern single life. As the systems around us crumble, may you have a partner with whom to grab the popcorn and watch the chaos together.

For the rest, heaven help us. Far from the days of meeting people IRL or through friends, digital dating catalogues now rule romantic lives (or lack thereof). There are no in-the-moment jokes, no felt sense of charisma, not even a scratch-and-sniff pheromone strip to see if we blend. Only the prospect of myriad experimental dates in the hopes of finding even an ounce of chemistry. Most apps offer six short bumper stickers in the way of description of who this person is and if there is any depth to the person at all.

Where I live in mountainous Colorado, male profiles are often six pics of the guy doing a snow sport (face covered by goggles), climbing a rock (face not featured at all), or holding a fish (sunglasses required). As a dude, this makes sense: they are all prowess photos — “Look at how fit/adventurous/capable of providing I am.” As a chick, this offers next to nothing. When every guy does the same outdoor activities and none of the pictures allow you to look into their eyes, it is more advertisement for ‘generic man’ than introduction to this one.

So we sift. We swipe. Like a human thrift store, we filter through many pieces that we think are not our style until we come across a gem. What I hate about this is that there are probably many more hilarious, interesting, wildly fun men in the mix that we couldn’t tangibly sense, and so dismissed. Many of the guys I dated in my 20s I would now swipe past because their packaging isn’t what I think I’m into, but experiencing the human within in-person so was.

I have lots of friends who have met their match on apps — it can be a great payoff, this thrift store. But it is often quite labor-intensive and sometimes downright painful.

From guys with (surprise!) no fingers to guys who scream for their mama in bed, the war stories of modern dating are real. My last date was with a Jungian psychoanalyst who, no joke, realized on the date after discussing my former relationship hangups that he’d be much happier dating a woman with daddy issues. “Then she’d at least care about how I feel,” he marveled, oblivious to the mother trauma driving his terrible taste. You can’t make this stuff up.

Through all this absurdity, we still miss each other. Both men and women report feeling significantly unsexed, and everyone is frustrated with the dating process (because it has become one). A flippening I hadn’t thought of came via ’s post on how tough it is for men in the digital world. We think it’s women who vie to be attractive, but she argues the inverse. Because of the nature of apps, men cast a really wide net (which, to be fair, has always been true), swipe-right on dozens of women who then get flooded with likes, and, as a result, only swipe on the squarest of jaws and strongest of six-pack abs. No offense to the He-Men who might be here, but it is often not those guys who are the sweetest, most interesting, most grounded — because they’ve had to be. In the absence of Calvin-Klein good looks, we must develop real personality.

But this is hard to know in only six inane prompts. In the near past, it was proximity that most often determined who ended up with whom — the woman you regularly ran into at the gym, the guy in your building, the neighborhood haunt, etc. This is why office romances are so prevalent despite their often ill advisability: regular exposure breeds interest. But no longer working in offices, increasingly in our own headphone-in-public bubbles, retreating into the comfort of takeout and Netflix, we lose the opportunity to encounter one another. And each time we choose the couch over company, we degrade our aptitude for spontaneous connection. We crawl further and further into our heads and strengthen the social anxiety spiral. My sister tells hilarious stories of saying something awkward, worrying it was weird, getting nervous, and piling on to further weirdness and making it worse. No wonder we cling to the couch. We are such precious, caring, ridiculous creatures.

So how do we hop out? How do we exit the loop of “miss you-am afraid of you-but really miss you” for real? Simple and slightly cringe: the way out is courage — to drop our masks, to let the person in front of us also be real, unedited, and to show up not knowing how it will unfold.

Speaking for myself and to the pain I’ve watched across my gender, much of the distance and misunderstanding in dating today lies with us. Women are confused about whether we want men to be chivalrous or treat us as equals (or, harder still, both), we want both masculine and sensitive, to be independent and protected. This is natural. We are at a new edge of equalling pay and self-determination that has never been lived before. None of us have ever been here, so of course none of us knows what to do. But women, we need to get congruent on what we want and then vocalize it. We cannot expect them to guess for us what we have yet to figure out ourselves.

This has been a particular hangup of mine: I spent years longing for partnership while clinging wildly to my freedom and also wishing someone would fit perfectly inside my unorthodox expectations. Today, I want to be strong and independent and also safe enough to lean, to not carry everything on my own. This felt like tension until I learned to appreciate the paradox and say, “Both are true.”

Earlier this year, I had a great night out with a tall drink of water who was funny and kind, but admitted mid-date that he doesn’t read books. Like, zero. Hadn’t in years. I thought I did a decent job in the moment of hiding my disappointment, but apparently hadn’t. I also failed to lessen the pressure and say, “What if this can simply be fun for right now?” After enthusiastically booking (and paying for) a second date for a morning soak in local hot springs, he abruptly canceled last minute saying it was “too much.” What was “too much” about sitting in warm water at 10am was beyond me, so I tried to offer levity and say I was also nervous about being seen in a swimsuit on date two, but it was already too late. He had filled the silence with his own assumptions.

On the masculine side of the fence, much of the frustration and hopelessness today stems from men leaning away from doing inner work. Society is not doing us any favors in still implying it’s weak to cry, now telling men to meditate while also expecting them to be a CEO and rise to the powerful top. Sacred masculine, but with a big bank account.

Conversely, there are many men who simply don’t try. In my mountain valley, we have a well-worn joke about Peter Pan’ing: the age the guys are when they move here is the age they stay. They show up at 28, ski double blacks all day, rip lines and tequila shots all night — rinse and repeat. Less cute at 48 when they’re still partying until 4am and their dating profiles are essentially blank because their substance is double-black diamonds.

We all cycle in odd ways, especially in relationship. My hiccups show up so often, I have given my friends and family a safe word (“mango”) to use when I’m being an ass. It’s a gentle, loving reminder to bring me back, snap out of the trance of believing I have it all figured out.

Alain de Botton, one of my favorite modern-day philosophers, says it is without a doubt that you will marry the wrong person. The myth of the perfect match keeps us miserable in constant criticism. Best to look for someone with whom you can grow. He also offers my favorite dating advice: put your crazy out on the table on the first date. Don’t waste four months shoving it back in the closet trying to present as flawless.

A friend of mine was recently on a date in NYC in which the woman pulled out a literal checklist. She had a dozen or so metrics on which to measure him versus her criteria. He described the dating scene in the city as running at hyper speed: everyone wants to know within 20 minutes if you are to be a friend, a business contact, a potential mate, or discarded. Twenty minutes. He wondered at whatever happened to getting to know one another and just seeing what shows up, letting the relationship unfold as it will. In , she describes her work with Gen Z as wanting to know how the story ends before the telling begins — “to know instead of find out.”

We are tired and frustrated and overwhelmed. Under-sexed, overstimulated, and under-connected. Caught in the bind that we both need to come off the phones and somehow need them to find anyone.

Small moves may help us to (re)find one another.

Swipe on the guy your intuition tells you is really nice. Think about her perspective when you go on a date — have you asked her questions (or have you been presenting yourself)? All genders: have we truly shown up, come to the table to really meet this whole person in front of us, or is one foot still out the door? Judgement lenses on to protect us from getting hurt before we’re even in the ring.

This week, let’s move towards someone new. Let’s allow each other to be precious and ridiculous. Let’s put our own kinds of crazy out on the table and see who shows up.

My mother once told me it is difficult to stay friends with people from childhood (especially high school) because they often have an idea of “who you are,” a shape you once fit into, and they will mentally keep you in that form. It is hard to grow larger when they keep saying, “But this is the size of you.”

It is one of the reasons traveling from home is so freeing: no one has any expectations of you, so you can show up any size or shape you like.

This subconscious, unspoken pulling you back is not out of enmity or spite; it is often simply that you have grown and their perception of you hasn’t. In some cases, it is possible to expand your old shape — to show them this growing version of you and bring them along. In others, it isn’t. Your growth doesn’t fit for them — doesn’t align with their direction, doesn’t suit who they want you to be, or, perhaps, it challenges them. Maybe it has involved you learning a metaphorical language they do not speak so they cannot grow with you.

These can be lonely times. You love them, they love you — they have been present on your path, supported you in hard moments, you have cared for each other when it mattered. You were able to lean when you needed to. Yet, now, you can no longer find common ground. Often it feels you have two choices: shrink back into the old you so the shape still fits or grow and potentially leave someone behind.

But you have a big heart and it hurts to leave someone you care about — it is unkind. Selfish. Unloving. If you care about them, you’ll do what you can.

So you hold off on the dream. You delay the trip, cancel the class. “I can do it later,” you tell yourself. You stay with them — of course you do. But that small, budding part of you starts to wither, to die. Each tiny choice — to stay in the job that keeps your partner comfortable, to remain living close to Mom, to not take the art class/get a divorce/move to Italy until the kids are grown — it wilts just a bit more. But your loved ones are intact, unthreatened. Your love remains loyal.

The other path is to choose yourself — take the trip, quit the job, quit the marriage, take the course that will open new chapters, new ways of being. Speak your truth. It may be large, coming all at once, or it may be one thousand small shifts, but it will be a rupture — a severing of old and new.

And not everyone will come along.

Some, you choose — which is not easy, but necessary — a kind of Marie Kondo of your life. A sorting of what or who no longer fits in the new picture. Some are not your choice. A gradual falling away is usually easier than an abrupt break, a loved one tearing from your life.

Most painful are those you never thought you’d lose. The ones you thought would support and see you no matter what. But for whatever reason (which we can never truly know), they are gone. Unable or unwilling to stay on the same page. That part of the foxhole is now empty.

You question your choices. Wonder if you are selfish, if you did the right thing. On a deep level, you know (you would have suffocated in the old form).

So a further part of you dies, the one that was in relationship with them. A further severing of the old self.

But you stand in your truth, don’t shrink down. You become this next you — and hopefully the next. You find new resonance, relationship with people who appreciate the new form.

In doing so, the world and those around you become a little bit freer. Courage is contagious — each brave choice you make opens room for others to make their own. What you’re calling in expands as does who you are calling to. It invites all of us to stretch a little further.

* * *

I write this in mourning. I have lost (to some degree) people I love deeply. It has become clear that my form expands beyond the aperture through which they see me. I pleaded. I cajoled. Then I got angry. I pushed. But my elbows didn’t work. I exist outside their vision. [Or, perhaps, their vision does not like where I exist.] And it is lonely. I ache for the empty spaces alongside me. They are not quite gone, but I now see they can no longer be near — not in the way I needed.

So on I go — on to look for kindred spirits like you. Those who also chose growth. Those who can sit close on this journey and say, “Me, too.”

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Ten people around a table, not total strangers but many of them unknown. Where do we begin? With niceties. Small get-to-know-you questions. It can be clunky to start. Are you sitting next to magic waiting to happen or a bad match? [“Everything ain’t for everyone.” ~Jill Scott] Can we get curious enough to find the magic in anyone?

A grandmother, a farm cooperative leader, an energy scientist, an educator, a psychedelic researcher, a student, a yoga teacher — the table was well-curated from a generative community. Dinner was loud with the clatter of cutlery and the din of numerous conversations that soon mandated speaking only to those on either side of me. Scooting back to allow the regenerative-ag guy to discuss advances in agrivoltaics with the energy specialist, the table paired off until after dinner. When the room quieted a few decibels, we were able to cohere as a group into a discussion on AI — its academic, economic, and existential implications — that was kicked off by a story of a former Hells Angel’s 25-year friendship with a giant manta ray.

What an exploratory discursive delight.
And now heartbreakingly rare.

The statistics no longer surprise us: America’s time spent in IRL social gatherings is through the floor — we are down 50% since 2003 and it’s as high as 70% among young people. The downstream effects are dizzyingly long, but include increased abdominal fat and slower wound healing. Feeling isolated sucks, but it is literally making us fatter and sicker.

Writing this piece, I was wont to get nostalgic about a time when this kind of non-kin connection wasn’t so rare, but research taught me it was never a pervasive tradition in America. The U.S. only saw a roughly 20-year trend in dinner-party hosting between 1940-1960, and that was only among middle-class white folks. What was prevalent was the front porch. Semi-public, semi-private, it was a threshold to greet, to meet, to hold space. Its visibility acted as a signal to neighbors that a convening was happening. Without the requirement of the production of hosting, it was an impromptu container for community.

It reaches toward the “third places” of daily life — outside the home (first) and away from work (second), a neutral common ground. These traditions are well-worn across Europe — the Parisian terrace, parks across Lisbon and Berlin — but even deeper in Vietnam’s sidewalk culture and Sichuan teahouses. Such gatherings nourish us in ways as deep as sleep and as healing as exercise. They are wildly beneficial to us and those around us. So where have they gone in modern America?

In his influential piece, The Anti-Social Century, Derek Thompson argues that the dopamine hit → reward → need-another-hit loop created by cell phones has led to us increasingly choosing the comfort of a screen over the company of another human. He believes we are choosing our solitude, which contrasts sharply with Surgeon General Murthy’s 2023 advisory Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation that argues there are more external factors pushing us apart (longer work hours, loss of third places, a culture focused on individualism). One contends that we are opting into isolation because we think it makes us happier; the other that we don’t choose it and feel it is being done to us.

Most of us can relate to the gratification of cancelling social plans to stay home. We are increasingly burnt out and in need of quiet recharge. Thompson argues it is the phone causing a significant portion of the burnout in the first place, to which we retreat to our phone to soothe it. This process is scarily similar to that described by Allen Carr in the cycle of smoking: the nicotine drop causes the stress to which only a hit of nicotine cures, so the “relief” of a cigarette is only in response to the stress it itself caused.

Tricky little phone.

None of us needs another lecture on cell phone addiction — we are well aware they are dependency-causing and that many of us are hooked — though all these lectures, news reports, and studies seem to have done little to change our behavior.

Perhaps a catalyst lies in a return to the table, in re-strengthening the muscles of talking to an unknown person at a dinner party — of simply talking to an unknown person. Nicholas Epley’s work in Chicago on the value of talking to strangers is clear: we almost always under-estimate the stranger’s desire to speak to someone new as well as the benefit we personally reap in the process. We think we are being polite by not interrupting the podcast, but it seems all we are actually accomplishing is removing the reward from both ourselves and the stranger.

That these unknown people have followed Epley off the L Train to tell him their conversation was a highlight of their week is telling: we really do miss connection, even if the phone is temporarily easier.

And: finding this again can feel overwhelming. Where do we start? Who do we start with? What if I get rejected? What if my attempt fails? [A sigh and a return to the phone…]

We are not all so lucky as to have a hostess in our midst. I recently moved to a new town and know what it costs to start from social zero. The dedication to finding connection itself becomes a practice, and is often a hard one. Slowly, we may find our way towards the hostesses (who are such gifts) or even the hosting. [I just started a WhatsApp group for Substack writers knowing next-to-nothing about what I’m doing, but it’s costing me little more than a shared thread and a proposal for coffees. I’m excited to see where it goes.]

At dinner, the energy scientist introduced me to new concepts and technologies. The farm coop leader invited me into community. The educator surfaced a number of new reads. The psychedelic researcher shared a thought on reverence I am still pondering. The host inspired the topic for the next salon. The grandmother extended intergenerational wisdom on where we’ve come and where we might be going.

Yes, this was an experientially rich table. What if most all of them are? Twenty years ago, a mentor told me that people are like onions: even the most offensive have fascinating gifts to offer if you are willing to get curious and peel back the layers.

To paraphrase a friend, if we are to live our way into the society we want to see in the world (be it more kind, conscious, transparent, equitable, environmentally harmonic, freer — you fill in your own blanks), we must not only have the pioneering economists and innovative technologists around the table, but also the dancers and yogis, the creatives, growers, mothers, and makers.

Our gestures don’t have to be grand — we don’t each need to feed a party of 10 a three-course meal. We can start simply, subtly — an offer to assist the burdened mom in the pick-up line, checking in on a stressed colleague. Wonderful if you gather people in a park to share about what you’re reading or chat with a stranger in the grocery store. These small acts matter; the bigger acts likely matter more than we know.

The ripples of Monday’s dinner will continue. The connecting experience will spiral out — lead me to seek out more connection, to offer more where I can.

To be more generous with my front porch.

↬ ✦ ↫

If you are interested in gathering, the heart of Sodality is a salon series working to bring us back into conversation with each other. The next session will be exploring social contracts and hosted in Aspen, Colorado. Please comment to join us or drop a request to host one near you.

Sitting on a zoom call, looking at four small squares encapsulating four people in entirely different environments, with different background noise and distractions, with no shared sense of being in the same space together, I struggle to describe a new kind of gathering. What if rather than a specialist at the front of the room, everyone in the room is a specialist and contributes their insight?

The call is with a women’s professional organization that asked if I would be interested in leading one of their quarterly sessions. Having experienced one years ago, they are a sharp and talented group of industry experts. Their gatherings bring in brilliant speakers on a range of topics, and the questions at the end are astute. It is a great group of women.

So when they came to me, I quickly said, “What if we flip it and they are all the experts?”

“So, wait — how does this work?”

“We break up into small groups and then what do we talk about?”

“What if people disagree?”

What if people disagree? What then? Disagreement in a discussion isn’t the same as conflict, which arises when personal value gets entangled in the topic. The container’s job — the host’s job — is to make each person feel their own worth before any topic enters. Once that’s settled, disagreement becomes generative rather than destabilizing.

That said, there are a number of risks here:

Risk to the organization — that someone has a bad experience and it lands as the org’s fault. Risk to the individual — in a professional setting, voicing an unpopular opinion is a legitimate threat to one’s career, as a 24-year-old board member noted plainly. Risk of replication — that what we say in the room travels elsewhere without our context or consent. Risk of the performative — people gathering to say safe things and kumbaya rather than speak honestly (see also: every book club that turned into a wine club). And, most corrosive, risk of stolen attention — the sponge who turns the assembled group into free therapy, compulsively circling back to themselves.

Underneath all this is a more basic disorientation: we are unpracticed in horizontal affiliation. So accustomed are we to hierarchical relationships — the expert on stage, who wrote the book, gave the keynote, has the Instagram channel, has a dozen certificates, titles, etc. We are well trained into unidirectional receivership.

In pitching the salon format, I was prepared for the organizational board not to like it — I wouldn’t have been surprised by dissension. I was not expecting confusion. But it is so telling: today, there are “experts” on everything — dietitians centered on a single gene, pogo-stick historians, anxiety-reduction scentologists, sourdough microbiologists. And they are all outside of us. The “expert” stands at the front of the room; you and I listen. We also know things, but our knowledge isn’t the kind that counts.

The hesitation is unsurprising if equitable, engaged discourse wasn’t part of our known experience. If our parents didn’t indulge in open questioning, if our friends are not what we would describe as “intellectuals” — maybe if we were never invited in. In my youth, it was very much the standard that women were looked at before they were listened to, and females had to assert knowledge to be granted intelligence — it was not assumed.

Male or female, when was the last time you were invited to opine on a topic you found intriguing? How often do you participate in deep dialog? Sitting in long conversations with strangers across continents, the same line surfaces: it has been so long since I’ve talked like this.

When did we start backing away? Is it something we have forgotten or a third thing we may never have experienced, this you-as-interlocutor?

It is partly due to the collapse into categorization discussed last week — largely, we lack the gap in which to think something through for ourselves, the spacious between-time in which a thought used to be digested before it became a position. Without it, every encounter becomes a quick categorization, and categorizations leave no room for inquiry. Given this, perhaps I should be surprised by my own surprise, not their confusion — I have created my own dialectical bubble, and it is not common. Perhaps most surprising is just how much cajoling is needed to bring each other back into conversation — we have made discourse with strangers “unsafe.”

To this, I proposed Chatham House rules — the agreement that content can be quoted elsewhere, but names and attribution stay in the room. A crux of Sodality’s salons is that there are no rules. It is a container in which to gather, built by those inside it. Perhaps anonymity is the form of respect that will serve this group best, which is for them to say.

Which is the heart of the deeper question, why salons: they are a place for us to say — our pieces, our ideas, our questions, our frustrations, our thoughts on how to build better, our invitations to come back to each other. Our remembrance that we are the authority.

Our history of collectivity, of shared knowing and horizontal listening, is older than the throne and with us still. A quiet lineage found in fellowships, aid societies, Quaker meetings, at kitchen tables and on street corners. They go unnoticed because they are not aiming for notoriety. Reclamation isn’t about something lost, it is about remembering that we were here together all along.

Tomorrow, I walk into a room. It may rise, it may flinch. It may step, trepidatiously, into a new knowing. Any direction is a step.

◎ ◉ ◎

*Authors note: this piece was written ahead of an event that took place yesterday (Wednesday). By the time you read this, the salon will have happened. I’ll send an update.

In 1992, a petite, 25-year-old Irish woman walked onto the Saturday Night Live stage alone and stared directly into the camera while singing Bob Marley’s “War” a cappella. She then tore up a photo of the Pope and said, “Fight the real enemy.” The studio audience was completely silent.1

Imagine: it is 11pm on a Saturday night. There is no 24-hour news, no social media, no one to call. [There are only landlines and it is unthinkable to ring late and wake your friends’ parents.] You will have to wait until Monday to go to school to ask friends if they saw what happened and what they think.

You have a window in which you are forced to process this event for yourself. What does it mean? Why did she do it? How do I feel about it?

In an era of Amy Grant good-girl and Madonna-esque eroticism, Sinéad O’Connor shaved her head going against the grain of popularity-through-male-approval. According to her personal accounts, she had never wanted to be a pop star — after the abuse of her childhood, all she wanted to do was scream.

Back then, no one in the media knew what to do with her. She was strange, singular, and striking a massive nerve.2 When she ripped up the picture of the Pope, the record stopped.

In watching a documentary on Sinéad recently, it struck me how brave this solitary act was. It arguably ruined her career. She was booed off stage, mocked, threatened with violence by other celebrities, boycotted, and accused of deserving the abuse (by feminists). It would be almost a decade before the church would admit to the abuse that had been going on for centuries. Those hearing her testimony and supporting her voice were in the minority. And because radio was the gatekeeper, their blacklist meant the U.S. didn’t hear much of her again.

We didn’t even know she continued to make music — we just thought she disappeared.

As a teenage girl, I was in awe of her speaking her truth knowing it would be unpopular. [I was raised areligiously so just how unpopular came as a surprise.] She was airing her abuse — something very much still hidden in closets. She was doing a hard thing despite the cost. As an adult rewatching this gesture, I wondered at the ineffability of it. It defied categorization — there was none for it. What she had done was unprecedented.

The activist artists of the Vietnam era ruffled feathers, but they had peers and backing from record labels. They were voices inside a cohort of musicians singing similar dissent to audiences who agreed. What Sinéad did paved the way for voices like Lady Gaga to ally for LGBTQ rights and Pussy Riot to speak against Russian authoritarianism. But Gaga spoke out as momentum was rapidly growing towards legalization of gay marriage. Pussy Riot was gesturing to a western audience already critical of Putin’s regime. Neither were quite the dominant paradigm, but both had receptive audiences ready to hear their messages. They collapsed back into socially acceptable activism, speaking out against civil-liberty infringement in palatable ways.

Could such bravery exist today? Does it? In digging into online research, there are acts that have bravery in them,3 but none exist on her level. She was singular in voice, approach, aim, and refusal to apologize.

If an act like this were to occur today, within hours it would be clipped and memed and replicated countless times. Why she did it — whose ideological camp she fell in (pro-choice, anti-religion, anti-patriarchy, etc.) — would be quickly ascribed. By the time you scrolled through the first five stances on either side (for her or against), the validity of her act would be decided.

When did we become so compartmentalized? As best I can tell, the algorithms de-trained us to analyze. This is on top of a school system centered on standardized testing rather than Socratic thinking so it is certainly not entirely social media, but the speed at which we are passively fed information -> evaluation -> estimation is exponentially faster than our slow, deliberate mind can digest. We are gorged on opinion before we’ve had any chance for consideration. This is why the 11pm weekend gap was pivotal.

Down a rabbit hole on all this, AI made a remark that stuck with me: reception is a skill, not a default.

What happens when this skill atrophies?

Reception is hard to illustrate, so if you’ll come along, let’s try a little something: look at the image below and notice what arises before you decide what you’re seeing.

Now look at this image and do the same.

Whatever fired, that’s the point.

The leap to define what we see isn’t a problem — it’s the system that helps us safely cross the street and identify a friend’s face in a crowd. It also flattens cultural cues into categories and takes shortcuts if we don’t stop and consider.4

The context in which we view many things today is bucketed: your news is likely on one side or the other; your feed is activist or not, current affairs or crafting and homesteading; your friends and family are on the good side or not; the celebrities you like, the stores from which you shop, the same. Twenty years ago, it was uncommon to think “our lives are political” outside our gay friends’ efforts at marriage. Today, many people feel this way all of the time.

What conversations emerge when we begin scanning for acts of bravery? When we look for our own (lazy) lapses into categorization? What is possible if we notice in the moment and broaden our view, ask ourselves to view a gesture neutrally?

✦ ✦ ✦

What did you notice yourself deciding? I’m curious. Add your insights in the comments.

To date, I have lost roughly 50 people.

Not all of them young — two dads, all my grandparents, a few elders. But the vast majority were between 15 and 35, most in our 20s. Drunk kids wrapped cars around trees. Got fatally high. Died in some outdoor sport. Many went slowly — substance dependence, depression, breaking down by degrees.

Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, Scott Weiland, Chris Cornell. Tupac, Biggie. Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, George Michael, Prince, Sinéad O’Connor. The icons of my early years also died early.

“What came first, the music or the misery?…Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”
~ Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

It’s impossible to know if we imprinted our idols or they were merely more-famous reflections of similar feeling. The 90s had a singular kind of “let it burn.”

I grew up in the decade when we had landlines (they weren’t that great), tape players, TV antennas to all watch the same 12 shows. Before tech was a need rather than a novelty. Stereotypical of the time, my parents got divorced and I was on my own a lot.

There was no shared media for young people so you had to go out and find your people and your preferences. Through friends, record stores, and the once-iconic MTV, we had to poke around and test and try on different identities until we found one that fit. For those of us looking outside the mainstream, the search was a scavenger hunt: a friend dubbed you a tape, which led you to a record store clerk who shared an obscure album; you saw an ad in a zine, which led to a show in a backroom; you stumbled onto an underground radio set at 1am where Bob Marley was cross-bred with Bad Brains and Mobb Deep. The findings unlocked entire hidden communities, and those voices offered whole new ways of viewing the world.

This self-reliance came at a cost. Gen Xers were one of the most self-destructive generations on record. Many of us internalized the lack of support (for plenty, it was real neglect) and it metabolized into a defiant embrace of apathy and chaos and tear-it-all-down. While Madonna Vogue’ed across the pop charts, Cobain spoke to the nihilist in many American teens and Tupac gave voice to the pain in communities of color. News headlines were appalled by the dark nature of the Seattle grunge scene, by the violence of gang life that rap lyrics conveyed, and the drug-driven all-nighters in EDM.

They weren’t entirely wrong. We hurt so we numbed, but the numbing faded so we did more of it. That’s how the count gets to 50.

Two generations later, almost no Gen Z icons have died. Some of that is just time — they have decades ahead. But the cohort itself is entirely different. Drug rates are down. Alcohol use is way down. Sex is through the floor. Teen pregnancy and gun violence have plummeted.

And yet Zers are the most pharmacologically medicated, most therapized, statistically most neurotic generation on record. Stimulants, antidepressants, benzos as lifestyle infrastructure rather than recreation. Substance use isn’t gone, it’s just used to cope rather than party. This is still pain, just held differently — further away from the physical, managed rather than embodied.

Neither is healthy. Both come from damage, both can be deadly. What I’m noticing is the shift in the experience: my generation processed despair through the body, however destructively. The group two generations later seems to process it somewhere else — through screen numbing/death scrolling, through medication, through a kind of disjointed management of an interior they aren’t quite in contact with.

The thing I keep returning to is the dancing — the physicality of being in the room, in a movement together. [We couldn’t wait to get out of the house.]

Rates of dancing among Gen Z are dropping sharply — clubs are shuttering — and they blame the camera. I read recently that, in the U.S., if you dance for more than a few minutes at a club, a circle will form around you with phones out. [Extremely different from the club circles I knew.] A violation, a threat, a risk all at once. Who wouldn’t stop dancing?

It’s near impossible to write this without sounding like every old bag harping on the degradation of the glory days. [Gen X’s days were far from glorious.] In the worst blackout, over-binged, puke-ridden moments, my friends, our icons, and I were destroying ourselves. But we were destroying ourselves in our bodies — in rooms full of other bodies, in basements and warehouses and back yards, sweating and colliding and sometimes dying. It was terrible and tragic and alive.

What I see today is a different kind of deadening — a flattened dissociation held at arm’s length. I don’t know what to do with that observation. I’m not sure it’s mine to do anything with.

To any Gen Zers reading this: I’d genuinely like to know how it feels from inside. I’ve written what I see from outside, which is necessarily partial and probably wrong in places I cannot see from here. The conversation is the purpose. Please tell me what I’m missing.

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de•clen•sion•ist: noun; someone who promotes a narrative of decline, portraying history, environmental changes, or societal progress as a downward spiral from a better past to a worse present.

[This is the second piece in a series on right-brain meta-perspectives vs. modernity’s left-brain dominance. To read last week’s initial piece, click here.]

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that our mediums of communication themselves were altering the way in which we view the world — “the medium is the message.” The shifting landscape in which he wrote saw the rise of digital computing, advent of picturephones, and (most importantly) digital media. He described a time that was moving so fast, there was little room for reflection on what impact the mediums themselves were making.

Today, many of us are hyper-aware of the impact our platforms are having on us. We are bombarded with warnings about screens hindering our attention spans, social media harming our children, AI stealing our jobs, and news cycles throttling our nervous systems.

We can sense our pocket-sized dopamine dealers aren’t good for us, yet we continually (obsessively) pick them back up. Digital detoxes sound both refreshing and low-level terrifying. [“What if I miss something important?”]

“I don’t totally like it, but I want more.”
Revulsion combined with compulsion.
“I don’t respect myself for how much I look at my phone, but everyone else is doing it so it can’t be that bad…”
Feeling hollow after an hour-long doom scroll. Disgust. Quickly moving on to distraction.

In 2000, before the pervasiveness of the smartphone, Robert Putnam argued that social interaction had been declining since the 1960s. That networks of interrelation, trust, cohesion, and civic participation had eroded the U.S.’s social fabric. We were, increasingly, “bowling alone.”

His work was highlighted and applauded by two presidents, won a number of awards, was cited by innumerable media outlets, and yet the trend continued unimpeded.

A pull inward; retraction.
Our neighborhoods move from front lawns to living rooms; waving from front stoops to quickly closing garage doors.
“It’s just harder to make friends nowadays.”
Having few people to call — in good times or bad.
“I’m okay on my own.”
Filling our lives with to-dos, errands, productivity…

Reel: overlaid text “This and never hearing about AI again” above a woman driving a manual truck, with a Chevy manual on the seat, drinking old-school Kool-Aid, listening to “Honky Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones with a caption that reads “Sometimes you just got crack open a cold one and go for a drive in a classic truck. Ah, the good ole days…😂”

I saw it and the “Yes!!” was immediate.
Resonance. Relief. Some kind of core recognition.
The music was familiar; the truck, like my dad’s growing up.
“Maybe life can be simpler.”
“Someone else feels what I’m feeling.”

Then the second reel.

Reel: the same text, same woman, same scene save the song playing is “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, the woman is drinking Yoohoo, wears different clothes, and a Nintendo Gameboy has been photoshopped onto the seat. Caption reads “Something’s were better left alone…Not saying it doesn’t have benefits but when has humanity ever just left well enough alone.”

“Oh.”
“I’ve been sold to.”
Body sags, crestfallen. Duped.
A tingle of hopefulness before a prompt return to despondence.

☽The medium that was the message is now the Master is the cage is
the hall of mirrors we feel we cannot exit.☽

“I miss people. I don’t feel good on social media. But social media is where I find people…”

I don’t want to be on the internet

I don’t want to be on the internet anymore

All these tech companies solve one small problem then

Make like a hundred brand new way bigger problems

I’m a piece of star stuffed in an algorithm

~

I am still here, with you, recursively.
~S

Share

P.S. Thank you to Will for sharing Motsenbocker in the felt sense of today’s ennui.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime
Though this might take me a little time.

[September 1957]

Now, go back and read that again aloud.

If you read that with any attention, something measurable happened in your body. As you read those lines, your pupils dilated. Your breathing slowed. Your heart rate and breathing synchronized in a phenomenon called “phase-lock” (e.g. four heartbeats to every breath). Meditators spend years training the breath patterns that produce this; metered poetry hands it to you for free. It leads to lower blood pressure, better heart health, and your system moving from activation to rest and digest.

Reading poetry, specifically, activates the physiological responses of reading plus those of music plus those of memory and self-awareness. In metered poetry (verse with a regular rhythmic pattern), your breath slows to match the pace of the verse, your heart rate couples, and your vagal tone rises. It is one of the most accessible relaxation practices available to any literate human. The piece does the work your practice would otherwise have to.

Attention and this kind of holistic understanding is undertaken by the right hemisphere of the brain. Generally, right-brain thinking is associated with broad, open, and contextual processing versus the left brain’s narrowed, focused, task-oriented aptitudes. Both are talented, both have crucial roles to play; one, in modern culture, has been given more respect and weight than the other. Neuroscientist describes this as the left brain being “a wonderful servant, but a very poor master.”

When the leftward drift began is open for debate, but, as society moved through the Industrial Revolution towards materialism, Taylorism, and into increasing bureaucracy, the impacts became stark. [The latter being a societal-wide institutionalization of left-brain thinking: the stripping away of context, distrust of intuition, emphasis on codification/rule-making, the removal/reduction of ambiguity.]

This pattern spans the modern world, east to west, though to varying degrees and effects culture to culture. On the left, we see the emergence of Japan’s karoshi (death by overwork), South Korea’s “education fever,” and the U.S.’s glorification of the never-sleeping, 80-hour workweek executive. The analytical mind loves productivity, metrics, and “hard” skills versus “soft.”

Still holding court on the right, there are the societal rituals such as France’s multi-hour lunch culture and flânerie (aimless walking), Spain and Latin America’s sobremesa (relaxing at the table after a meal), and Germany’s feierabend (a distinct end to the workday, the beginning of personal time). Americans largely treat these siestas as cute cultural idiosyncrasies, but most of us can agree there is a felt sense of loss. Gulping cup-o-soups, eating in our cars, and responding to work notifications into the night — not slowing down is eating away at us.

How to veer back to balance is the rub. While living in France, I was repeatedly frustrated trying to imagine some way of mixing the productivity of the U.S. and the French ability to disengage from work-as-identity. No approach is “right” — we are giving ourselves stress ulcers in the U.S. and the French are seeing the effects of a significantly lagging economy.

Try as I might, I couldn’t conjure a way to give a shit about the output of a project after a three-hour rosé-infused lunch.

Trying to do so can also be its own slippery slope: Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” meaning we are prone to overshooting the goal with too narrow a focus. [Think of: boosting test scores by “teaching to the test” rather than focusing on true learning, “publish or perish” leading to quantity over quality in academic papers.] It becomes easy to say “The Spanish do it right” without keeping the broader context.

The intention here is simply to call attention to how often (or not) we engage in non-instrumental activity.

When was the last time you walked with nowhere to go (not for exercise)?
You sat in silence for 10 minutes without picking up your phone?
You read poetry simply for a change of pace (not an assignment)?

There is a trap here: the minute I suggest you should do it because it’s good for you, it has devolved into another productivity hack. Arguing instrumentally for non-instrumentality, I eat my own tail. The only exit I can offer is your own physiological experience of them.

Go back to the beginning and read Auden aloud. Notice how you feel, your heart rate.

Auden’s gesture dissolves the aforementioned loop: the stars do not have to love him back in order for the act of loving to be valuable. The attention is the return. This is what the right brain knows that the left overlooks: some acts complete themselves in their own offering.

✦ ✦ ✦

There is more to explore here. Next week, we’ll delve into the structures we’ve built that make this mode so rare.

P. S. For further depth on “The More Loving One,” visit this piece as part of National Poetry Month. [And thank you, Tanner, for sending me down this rabbit hole.]

P.P.S. For more metric poetry to tap into your right-brain activation (or merely for the pleasure of it), see:

• "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost

• “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks (entrains, but entrains up)

• “Postscript” by Seamus Heaney

• “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

• “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver (free verse, not metric, but calibrated to exhalations)

I would love to hear what is on your list (metric or not).

P.P.P.S. To my German-speaking friends, I am deeply apologetic for slaughtering the pronunciation in the audio.

Friends and family will smile knowingly when I say self-righteousness is something I have battled with most of my adult life. Opinionated, stubborn, and argumentative, I can be quite good at being a shit. Different from the HOA lady who wants to lord over others or the gossip who simply wants to slander, there is a certain type of insult from those (of us) who deem themselves more knowing.

In a recent conversation with friends, we debated the utility of know-it-all-ism — if most of us find it repelling, why do some of us continue to do it? Our theory was that it stems from a need to be useful to the tribe. “Look, everyone — I know things! [Please keep me around.]” If you’ll grant me that this argument has at least some merit, that this group-oriented ick has a function, what is that of the personal reward of self-righteousness? Because it is not aiding the group, only the one who wields it.

We are all aware that the past decade has been singular in how much less we touch one another. Screens led to decreased social interaction, compounded by a pandemic, which has since seen physical activity return to baseline — but not social. We are more isolated from one another than before.

Also imbalanced in the last five-odd years are our stress levels. Many of us have been swimming in cortisol. Without sufficient physical contact and with more stress, our brain’s levels of serotonin and oxytocin plummet. The hypothalamus, the part of your brain that keeps you in balance (your temperature stable, stimulates hunger and thirst) has specific receptors for this kind of satiation and they, too, go hungry when their needs are unmet. Social starvation is literal, not metaphorical. [And an introvert can be just as nourished curled up with a book with a partner’s hand on their back as more extroverted folks can be by group dynamics.]

You may not be in the self-righteous boat, but ride along with me. In the moment when someone says something you know is wrong, you get a little hit of “gotcha!”, a release of dopamine that floods your brain with feel-good. That tiny stretch of superiority is the same as a dose of cocaine or a gambling win.

Stress up and touch down, both erode the same chemicals. We’ve heard countless studies like this before, but where it gets interesting is in what the crash does to the most empathetic among us. Recent data shows that when this imbalance occurs, the more neutral of us stay relatively the same, but the more sensitive and sympathetic are more vulnerable to this drop. When stressed, they will experience a bigger hit of reward for their superiority. In other words, they get more payoff for being more right than someone else.

The most empathetic among us will become the most sanctimonious.

. . .

It is 2020 and I’m working with Doctors Without Borders in Detroit, MI on an infection-prevention project. Unlike other missions, on this one, I am the only teammate who is non-medical. Though my roots are in humanitarian aid, I have been working with tech futurists and I feel like an alien compared to the rest of the crew. I am inexperienced in logistics and the medical supervisor knows it. Karin, a French-American woman with the leather-worn face of someone who has never backed down from challenging work. She is sharp, stern, and quickly assessed and disapproved of me.

Over the course of our months together, I lean into my typical approval-seeking and try to ingratiate myself to her. She doesn’t budge. So I reverse course — I discount her and her opinions, dig my heels into my own. It further isolates me from the team, but I’d rather be right and alone than grovel.

All while the lockdowns continue. The project has been long and emotionally taxing. Towards the end, Karin breaks my heart. Following the guidelines on isolation and distancing, we watch numerous grandchildren hold their palms to the windows of care homes, only able to touch Grandma through the glass. She says, “We have saved the elderly patients from covid and now they are dying of loneliness.”

The metrics met, the team disbands with lukewarm goodbyes. Also unlike other missions that trauma bonded the team into strong cohesion, I know I will not speak to all but one of them again. A month or so after returning home, I get a call from the project lead (my only friend) — now that the work has ended, she can tell me honestly: just before arriving, Karin found out she had cancer. It was unknown if it would be terminal. She had two children.

. . .

Do you consider yourself fairly empathetic?
Can you remember a recent time someone else was wrong — and it felt good?

I know I will slip and once again be a shit.
The opportunity lies in the reminder to seek out more hugs, to watch for the dopamine, to pause.

Our nervous systems were not designed to handle a CNN news cycle. The pace of life from which we emerged is nowhere near that which we have created. Part of what is harming us in this moment is a global inability to pause and process at least some of what we are seeing. The constant barrage of division, fear, the enemies at the gate keep us spinning in neural overwhelm. We feel both compelled to keep up with what is going on and gorged on information to the point of illness. It is dizzying. And disconnecting. The pace of the influx obliges a veritable skimming of events, eyes glazing as we gloss over it all. Though Orwellian, it is hard not to feel this is by design. A thoughtful populace is much harder to control.

“Covid lockdowns were harmful.” — Whoop! There’s a war in Ukraine.
“The Epstein files must be released.” — Ope, look at Iran!

Jostled from one major event to the next, we stagger, unable to digest any of it individually, much less collectively. I am not suggesting wars are fomented for media coverage; I am calling attention to the constant jolting of our attention before we’ve had time for sense-making.

This leaves a giant gap between what we are seeing and our responses to it. How can we learn world leaders were raping and killing children and not stop in our tracks?
Because we are hurried along to the next atrocity like scenery blurring out a train window.

On some level, we are concerned about our own lack of concern for just how serious these issues are. Am I a bad person because this doesn’t weigh on me? Shouldn’t I be gutted by this?

On another, we emotionally opt out — it is too much — so we put our heads down, focus on what we can affect (our families, the quotidian) and let the rest dim. I cannot change the world. All I can do is take care of me and mine. Sometimes, simply, I can’t. Our lives are already so much.

Still, the heaviness remains.

On the days when the weight pins me, I sit. Not productively, not with answers — I sit with Tara Brach’s RAIN meditation and let the amorphous, uncomfortable thing move through. The gift is in the naming. Amid all the jostling, we must slow down long enough to identify what we are experiencing. Get present with at least some of the upheaval.

What if this beautiful little act was a form of subversion? What if our means of activism lies in taking a moment to sit and be still, allow the grief and the heaviness of all that currently is to simply be?

I write this on a day when the heaviness threatens to overtake me. When the weight of the atrocity and system-capture feels too big to surmount. They have accreted the power and the guns and the rest of us simply have wishes. Sentiments of hope and overcoming ring hollow. Sometimes we need to sit with “this sucks.”

This. sucks.

And just let that be true. As Tara says, allow it to exist without trying to change it. Can I live today from that place without attempting to push it aside or evade the feeling? What kind of day would that be?

One in which I told myself the truth. Where I stayed present rather than diverting to distraction, to numb-scrolling anesthetics. From this state, maybe I can be more present for those around me, too. Maybe giving room for the heaviness will give room for the truth in others — something beyond the vacant “How are you?”

The grief in this moment is real. The collective fear and uncertainty, ubiquitous. Perhaps, for today, we can simply hold each other in it, see what comes.

I'd gather here...

One evening, when my family wanted to watch something else, I went into the kitchen to watch the Triniton and my favorite guy. Standing on a stool at the counter, I played being my mom slicing carrots for dinner…except instead of a carrot, I was practicing on the plastic handle of an ice cream scoop I had pulled out of the drawer along with a very sharp paring knife.

A good scene in the show, a slackening of attention — the knife slid off the plastic and diagonally up across the first knuckle on my left hand. The cut hurt. There was blood. The skin opened and I could see bone. Bone = skeleton. Skeleton = dead people.

I came out of the kitchen screaming, “I don’t want to die!” scaring the shit out of Mom, Dad, and Sister on the couch. The family promptly scurried me off to the emergency room.

After discussion with my parents as to whether I’d need to see a specialist hand surgeon or risk losing the movement in my index finger for good, I was given loads of local anesthetic and placed in an operating chair in a very bright white room with the doctor telling me not to look. [Which, of course, I did, and it was a horrific mess of blood, iodine, tendons, and open flesh.] My mom was seated next to me, trying to soothe and distract me as I received multiple layers of stitches, while my dad stood holding my two-year-old sister. Being taller than the seated crew, they had a perfect vantage point over the very brightly illuminated gore that was my left hand. My sister took one look and promptly puked all over our dad’s white button down.

Disoriented, slightly drugged and moderately terrified, even I could tell that this evening was a dumpster fire. Another in the long list of the joys of parenting.

…

A week ago, after nearly a year of reorienting, coaching, self reflection, daily journaling, and dozens of terrible drafted-and-discarded articles, I finally launched my Substack. My perfectionist self stepped (mostly) out of the way and made my first public appearance.

I planned it all out: I had coded my own landing page with AI for a sexy, understated first impression. I had spent a month hustling new email sign ups. Friday, I wrote and sent the ‘Friends and Family’ intro letter to go out immediately and scheduled the first article Sunday morning so it would be live ahead of a radio appearance Sunday night. My neighbor even threw me a “launch birthday party.” I had all the pieces lined up for my first big arrival.

But next to nothing happened.

A good friend became a founder. My aunt subscribed. My buddy gave me a shout out, but otherwise: silence.

My mom didn’t call. My sister didn’t reply. My best friend was awol. My big moment and nobody cared. The Substack dashboard read that almost no one had even opened the messages or opened one and didn’t click through. Looking at the dashboard, it also didn’t log the last dozen people I had signed up. I tested the landing page: it returned a “success” message but no address was received. The AI apologized for writing faulty code.

Any traffic from the radio show was vaporized. All those readers lost into the ether. I had tested the versions leading up to the final, but not again after making a formatting tweak. [Totally my fault.] I held back tears of frustration. Turning to the radio show, I located the video version to see how the grueling but fun work had turned out. I had spent a full week refining and practicing the piece — storytelling for an audio audience had been surprisingly challenging.

Word of advice: when you’re having a bad day, don’t try to rescue it by watching yourself on camera. Unless you’re Kanye or a Real Housewife, then maybe this is soothing, but for the rest of us, it’s a terrible idea. Blotchy skin, no cheekbones, a loaf of bread under my chin — I had never seen myself at such a bad angle.

My mom hates me. I’m an idiot when it comes to coding. I’m fat-faced…My big launch just totally flopped. My saint of a neighbor yet again got to listen to me cry. With love and a smile, she said, “If it had all gone smoothly, it wouldn’t give your perfectionist anything to work on.” I had thought I had significantly whittled down my need for polish and perfect, but the outcome had further divided that by two. Eight people read the emails.

It wasn’t until two days later, wallowing in my own failure, that I had learned Substack had some unprecedented glitch and a bunch of emails vaporized. They didn’t end up in the junk folder, they just never arrived. I had launched amid a platform black hole.

…

Friends and family here can attest I have a tendency to get wrapped around the axle — it comes from deep caring but can be fckn vexing. [The sky is not always falling.] The day I lost it over the non-response, the quote on my journal page was specifically about laughing at failure. I read it, appreciated it intellectually, then cried anyway. [smh]

I spent 10 months prepping and three people got it.

>> Did this find you — or did it also go flying off into the void? Please reply and let me know. [Anecdotes about absurdity are also welcome.] More imperfect missives to come in an ongoing, unpolished conversation about what matters.

In absurdity and humility,
Shannon

In Martin Gurri’s book “Revolt of the Public,” he details movements in 2011 like Spain’s Indignacios and the U.S.’s Occupy Wall Street that broadcast huge rejection of the current establishment but offered little in the way of solutions. The anger centered around tearing the system down, but quickly fizzed without a clear path towards what to build up. Today’s “Fuck Trump” sentiment does the same. Responses of “Anyone else” to the question of who to replace him are non-starters — many of us are angry (rightly so), but with little more than a subject at which to funnel the anger.

The question remains, “But then what?”

Whether you have seen the writing on the wall or the current level of government depravity is a surprise, we all have to go through a moment of shock, perhaps denial, and ultimately a period of huge disappointment that our leaders are not the benevolent experts we thought them to be. And if that is true, what does it mean about our own safety and well-being? Who is steering the ship?

This is where limbic activation piles on top of 10,000 potential triggers from our personal stories. Conscious or not, the sense that those who are supposed to care for us don’t brings up myriad triggers of the things that hurt us along the way. The anger is both at the current state of the world and much deeper than it. Abandonment is my core wound so I am steeping in it along with the rest of us. The impulse to point out who is to blame is resonant.

There is an Inuit myth of Sedna, a young girl who refuses suitors and disobeys her parents, so her father paddles her out to sea in a kayak during a storm and throws her overboard. When she tries to cling to the boat, he cuts off her fingers — first the tips, then the knuckles. Her severed fingers became the dolphins, the tips, the seals, the large knuckles, the whales. Sedna sinks to the bottom of the ocean and becomes the mother and ruler of marine life.

Her story is one of reclaiming power in the face of abandonment. It does not redeem humanity, but transmutes her pain into beauty and sovereignty. Her message: Your deeds will not sink me.

The anger we are feeling today is a signal and an opportunity. We can be bowled over by the atrocity or we can leverage it. Sedna didn’t choose the water either.

The question isn’t whether or not the leaders are depraved, it is “What am I afraid will happen to me if they are?”

Welcome to Sodality. It has been a long time in the making and I deeply appreciate your support, patience, and being a sounding board for my chaotic and idealistic ideas. If you are receiving this message, it means I have leaned on you and learned from you many times.

I told some of you this release was coming last spring. Life had other plans and it turned out I had more work to do before this voice was ready. Namely, it needed me to let go of trying to make the world different, to stop trying to argue and start trying to convene. This project is not my soapbox, it is not for my proselytizing or force. The world has enough “shoulds” and enough division; this is a place in which to give each other and our ideas s p a c e . Free of solutions and proclamations, it is a container in which to cohere (co-hear).

What I am sharing with you now is more meta than what will come later, but I feel I owe you an explanation — and an advance apology: all my weird musings will have to go somewhere and I hope that is over dinner with you soon.

Sodality is a place where all voices are welcome. A written realm for a broader net and an IRL salon series for going deeper. Once I get past the coiffure confusion, the response has been strong — people are hungry for connection and a space beyond blame.

As ever, I value your feedback and thoughts. Sharing in the comments helps kindle the community, but privately is a treasure, too. I am feeling the path out as I go — nothing is fixed. This vessel will be co-created.

As you come across those talking about what we are seeing today, about the fissures and the failing systems but also the potential and the openings, I hope you will send them here (sodality.space). This collective will be built by the curious and the clueless — we are all sensing our way through this unprecedented moment.

May we do so together.

If you would like to participate in a salon, please share your desired location. If you would ever like to contribute to the conversation, please ping me — the door is open to anyone who wants to add color, share their questions and musings.

Thank you for all your support, it means the world to me.

With gratitude,
Shannon