Photo: (cc) Martin Cathrae, Flickr.
At the Facing Race conference in Dallas last weekend, I had the good fortune to sit in on the keynote, which featured Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Toshi Reagon and Tashawn Reagon. Three generations of activists and culture makers on a stage talking about the threads we create generationally in the change we make.
Besides having our hearts opened with the grounding presence of Reagon-ness, which cannot be understated, we also got a short ethnography of Kumbaya, during one of the final questions that was asked. I honestly don’t remember exactly what the question was, other than it was calling out the “Kumbaya moments” we seek out, or utterly dismiss, in our leftist activism.
Dr. Reagon took a moment to school us on why we should consider not giving kumbaya the short shrift. I admit, I have done this, often. In my desire to transform my activism, and in my fed-up-ness with How Things Have Been Done™, I have, like many, found “kumbaya moments” to be easy targets that represent naïveté, and even the wishy-washiness of privilege, when radical action is required. It turns out, though, kumbaya is a radical call to action itself: it’s Gullah for “come by here.” Both a call to God, and a call to community, whichever way(s) you swing.
Come by here.
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I went spelunking recently into an old hard drive that covered my digital life from 2002–2008, looking for media from a project I’d poked at back then. I couldn’t help but get sidetracked going through all the other little oddities and artifacts that I’d found, most of which I had completely forgotten about. It’s as if my inclination as an obsessive documentarian of my life is really only to serve the very selfish purpose of soothing my own OCD; if I record it somewhere, somehow, I allow myself to forget it. Otherwise, all the bits take up too much emotional room in my mind, all of the uncontained memories frolicking and cavorting about with one another. That disarray is exhausting, and I fear having learned nothing from my experiences.
Among my discoveries in the hard drive were loads and loads of voicemails from friends and family that I’d recorded to my computer. I’d like to fake it and say I was some sort of hacker genius, but I just used duct tape to secure a mic to my old flip phone, and clicked record on the software on my computer. I always made sure to include the timestamps for posterity. This worked out particularly well for moments when the timestamp itself was key to understanding the importance of why a voicemail was chosen to be among the saved:
Going through the oodles of others in that folder, I remembered something that seems very straightforward and silly, but that struck me really hard: My friends and I used to call each other. For no reason. Just to say hi, or to tell a funny story, or to say we were thinking of each other.
Lest you think we’re about to head down a curmudgeonly path together where we decry the end of civilization because people never pick up the phone anymore and everyone is dying because our heads are buried in our smartphones and not in making inane small-talk with one another… don’t worry. We’re not.
However, I am thinking a lot these days about intimacy and how we create it, or how we let wither away. In my early travels on social media, one of the things that I loved most was the ambient awareness, as Clive Thompson called it, that we started to create with one another. Each little shared tidbit on its own might not have been that important, but each was a fragment that started to make up the portrait of a person’s life. It became easier to be intimate, in some ways, because we were ambiently aware. And we were sharing differently back then, too, because the party was smaller and we had no idea what the hell we were sharing.
The party got bigger, and some might tell you, things got worse. In one way, I agree—studies show that Facebook causes anxiety and stress, for example. Yet without fail, we’re there every two minutes checking our feeds and notifications, to see if anyone has a dopamine hit for us, to oxytocin ourselves up a level, to see if we are loved or even just noticed by the great wide ether. We want connection and intimacy, and we’re not getting it from our current state of tools.
Here’s where I start talking about a project I’m working on with 3 wonderful people to fix all our problems, right? The short version there: we’re creating a tool for small tribes of people to check in on each others’ emotional wellness. We recognize the need for that in our own overwrought, busy-infested lives, and we’re building it.
Bigger than that, I’m becoming desperately aware of how much we are being called to level up our emotional IQ, our higher processing powers of intention and language, and maybe most importantly, abandon the pursuit of happiness.
WHAT?
Yeah, I said it. Pursuing “happiness” a wild goose chase I’m not subscribing to anymore. And social media has taught me that lesson the strongest.
Remember when I said Facebook stresses people out? There are a bunch of reasons, but one of the main ones is pretty basic: everyone posts their best moments, their best selfies, their proudest achievements, their most inspirational quotes. Sure, there may be some humdrum or complaining here and there, but there’s a hell of a lot of life-is-good-isn’t-it-ISN’T-IT going on in increasingly annoying ways. And I know I’ve sat there in some of my lower moments, jealous or hurt as to why my life isn’t as good as that other person’s, why I didn’t get invited to that wedding, why my non-existent children aren’t as precocious as those kids right there on the screen. (At least my dog is.) Facebook hurts our damn feelings. And yet, because we’re silly mammals who are easily trained by intermittent positive reinforcement, we go back a few thousand times a day anyways, seeing if we get lucky and get high.
When I combine my own silly mammal-ry with managing my mental health, plus a healthy dose of “None of this is real” Buddhist-ish tendencies, and I’ve decided to be done with happiness. Part of it’s related to the fact that “am I happy?” is the wrong question to ask—check out this New York Magazine article from a few years ago which tried to investigate whether people with kids or without kids were happier. TL;DR: Neither. It was about feeling fulfilled.
[This isn’t to say I’m stopping getting my rocks off on fun stuff done purely for the sake of fun. But I’m starting to realize that the highs—and subsequent lows, which get very low the older I get—of my emotional rollercoaster just don’t feel sturdy enough to plant potatoes in. (Bonus points if you get that reference.)]
Fulfillment often comes from emotional, and physical, intimacy. It’s part of the messy bits that make us human; for the most part, we want to have and manage connections with one another. And we have to be way more intentional about that then ever. Our ambient awareness of each others’ public presentation can no longer be subsituted for the actual intimacy we crave and need.
I started a few months ago sending out a weekly email to my small tribe with two bullet points of how my week really was, and asking them, if they had time, to send two bullets back to me. The results were revelatory in content, of course—having the opportunity what actually happened in people’s lives, and how they were feeling, versus social media’s versions of ourselves.
Two very important unexpected results have come about, though. One, I feel better knowing what’s happening with my people. I feel more connected and stable, even if it’s only every 3rd week that a person has a chance to respond. My emotional well-being is tied to the well-being of my tribe.
Two, I’m connecting in other ways to people, more emotionally intimately, again. Having long, drawn-out phone conversations that dawdle and dig at the bits inside of us that have gotten crusty. Arranging dinners regularly with people I’d only get around to seeing once a year or so. Gaming online with people that make me laugh hysterically.
It’s intense. It takes a lot of time, and nurturing. It takes intention to reach out (for all parties involved) and it takes emotional energy to be reachable. Caring for each other in new ways, with lots of tools, online and off, though—that’s leading me towards fulfillment.
Come by here.