And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
– “Once in a Lifetime”, Talking Heads
(Play this track while reading this post if you like)
I know many people that are lonely.
I know they’re lonely because they tell me so–friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers, etc.
I have a suspicion that most of us are lonely. Most people in America, that is.
This post isn’t about loneliness though. Not exactly.
Right now, I’d like you to think about the times you’ve been happiest.
In accessing those memories, you may remember times in your life that were rich in friendship and shared experience with others.
You may have been a child going to a school that provided a safe and nurturing environment. You may have had ample free time to explore your neighborhood and play with your friends. You may have looked forward to holidays, and the natural rhythm of the seasons.
If you were raised in America, this might include experiences like hot dogs and fireworks on the Fourth of July. Costume shopping and trick-or-treating on October 31st. Unwrapping gifts on Christmas with your family.
College may have been another time in which you felt happy and deeply connected, or possibly as a young professional or a newly-wed.
For all of these experiences, the key ingredient is “other people”.
Conversely, you may have had experiences in your life that were challenging or even downright awful…yet were deeply meaningful.
Likely these were experienced, not in solitude, but with and amongst other people.
Friends, partners, lovers, acquaintances, co-workers, neighbors, etc. Our connections with others are what gives our lives meaning.
A Karass, By Any Other Name
There are times in our lives when things seem to simply happen, as if we are the main character–or at least involved in a storyline that progresses without much prodding.
At those times, it’s likely we are involved in a karass, which is a term Kurt Vonnegut coined in his book, Cat’s Cradle.
Here’s Vonnegut’s definition, from the book:
“Bokononists believe humanity is organized into teams—a “karass”—that ‘do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.’ ”
— Cat’s Cradle, Chapter 1
Essentially, a karass is a group of people that have been hand-picked by God to go on a mission.
If you identify as a non-believer don’t worry too much about the concept of God for now. To believe in the concept of the karass, you do not need to believe that God is a man or a woman or is even sentient in a way that we can understand. Simply believing in coincidence or serendipity is more than enough to benefit from using the karass as a concept or a model for finding one’s people, and by derivation, newfound meaning in life.
All you need to know is that a karass is a group of people whose fate is somehow cosmically intertwined, and that all share the same mission, whether they are aware or not.
You might say a karass is a vehicle that is fueled by serendipity, that carries a group of people in service of a mission that is only knowable after the fact.
Feeling Stuck? Perhaps It’s Time to Find Your Karass
This post is about finding your karass.
I am writing a post about “Finding your Karass” because the stated goal of this newsletter is to explore new strategies for surviving capitalism.
One of the biggest crises of capitalism is “The Meaning Crisis”.
The Meaning Crisis is a term coined by a philosophy professor and meditation teacher by the name of John Vervaeke.
Vervaeke has a 50-lecture series on this topic on Youtube and I recommend it.
According to Vervaeke, we are experiencing a crisis of meaning in the West. Without religion, without a sense of the sacred, and without meaningful roles for most people in our society, we are experiencing a massive societal bummer.
And by that I mean people are more depressed/anxious/suicidal, having less sex and babies, and overall feel like life is more meaningless than ever.
If you are not experiencing these societal symptoms in your own life, it’s likely you are in denial or insulated by wealth.
Or maybe I’m wrong. In that case, leave a comment telling me why I’m wrong ;)
Vonnegut wrote about the Meaningness Crisis too, using his own words, in Cat’s Cradle–50 years before Vervaeke. Cat’s Cradle is essentially an exploration of how people have been displaced from meaningful roles in society by machines, and what’s to come.
Because of the meaningness crisis, things like drug use, mental health disorders, and suicide have increased exponentially over the past few centuries.
Which makes us all the more susceptible to granfalloons.
Beware of Granfalloons
By Vonnegut’s definition, a granfalloon is a false karass.
Some examples of granfalloons: college affiliation, being a part of a “workplace culture”, skin tone, gender, political affiliation.
Beware of granfalloons.
Unstuck in Time
To more deeply understand the concept of the karass, it seems important to me to provide some bullet points on the term’s creator, which I will do below.
I’d also recommend watching Unstuck in Time, a superb Vonnegut doc made over a 40-year span by Robert Weide, who Larry David-heads may recognize as one of the recurring directors of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Weide became friends with Vonnegut in his early 20’s, and captured footage of his subject for four decades. After Vonnegut died, Weide decided to finally finish the documentary.
I would recommend watching it to anyone who makes art, or writers, especially.
After I watched it, I read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Cat’s Cradle, and this book of his letters. My plan is to read all of his books this year. I like how he writes simply about complex things.
To me, there’s a power, a clarity, and a sense of compassion in his work that makes it worth studying. Only a few other writers that I’ve read have this: Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, James Joyce, and Anton Chekov.
You might lump Butler, Le Guin, Vonnegut, and George Saunders together as part of a “compassionate, powerful writers who redefined sci-fi as a means of exploring societal problems” karass.
I also enjoy his wit. He’s got that goofy, eccentric uncle vibe. He’s fun to read.
Next, I’ll explore how Vonnegut’s formative experiences may have given us the term of the karass, as well as the five most significant karass’ in his life.
I’ll round out the end of the post with some thought on how to find one’s karass, and how to know if you’re in one currently.
Kurt Vonnegut Facts and Foibles
High-level:
Born to some wealth. The Vonneguts owned and ran multiple businesses in Indianapolis, including the Vonnegut Hardware Store.
The Vonnegut family lost most it’s wealth in The Depression.
Lost his mother to suicide in 1944, right before he was shipped off to war.
Experienced the bombing of the old German city of Dresden in February 1945. Along with other Allied POWs, was made by the Nazis to dig up the dead and put them in burial pits until the war was won.
Married childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox.
Languished in obscurity until the publication of Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut worked as a GE public relations man, a Saab dealership owner, and a teacher at school for troubled boys. He hated all of these jobs, and spent much of his free times writing short stories(at first) and then novels(later).
Owes his success to his partnership with Jane, who (strongly)encouraged him to make a go of writing full-time. She was also a writer, and served as his editor for his early short stories and novels, bore three children, and ran a household that consisted of seven children after they decided to adopt the four orphaned nephews of Kurt’s late sister.
Divorced Jane for another woman when he became famous from Slaughterhouse-Five. Jane later remarried and published a memoir of her own.
Was prolific as it gets, publishing “14 novels, 3 short-story collections, 5 plays, and 5 nonfiction works”, according to Wikipedia.
Helped and supported many writers throughout their careers with advice, money, blurbs, and other opportunities.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Karasses
As far as I can tell, Vonnegut had four, possibly five, karasses in his life. Each of these karasses shaped his personality and writing abilities like a chisel to stone.
Obviously Kurt is well-known and beloved by many. He is the product of his karasses.
That said, it would be foolish to assume that the purpose of each of these karasses was to produce The Kurt Vonnegut. One way to see the world is as the product of the first- and second-order effects of millions, or even billions of karasses.
Anyway, Vonnegut is a useful case study, as a way of examining the concept of karass, and how our own lives might be shaped by the events that happen to us, and the people we find ourselves with while those events are happening.
Kurt’s Karasses:
His family of origin. He adored his older sister Alice. He was also close with his brother, Bernard, who helped pioneer the first known use of climate engineering technology while working at GE. Bernard got Vonnegut his job doing PR at GE, a saving grace when Vonnegut was broke, recently married, and looking for a job. Also his mother, who, during the depression, took it upon herself to become a short story writer by taking mail-order courses. In this 1964 Paris Review piece, Kurt said, “She studied writers the way gamblers study horses.”
Lesson: One karass may lay the groundwork for the next. If Kurt’s mother had not aspired to be a short story writer, would Vonnegut have been a writer at all?The other POWs who were housed in Slaughterhouse Five. In writing about his experiences about present during the bombing of Dresden, he has not written much about the other POWs, at least to my knowledge, but here is a detailed account of his experience, viscerally rendered here by one Charles J. Shields.
Lesson: Being in a karass isn’t always fun, or may even show you the worst humanity has to offer. However, Vonnegut’s experiences at Dresden gave us Slaughterhouse Five.His marriage to Jane. As mentioned previously, Jane was the one who practically forced Kurt to take a chance on writing. It’s likely he would’ve continued on his path of kicking around different jobs and it would’ve taken him much longer to become a professional writer of fiction. Maybe he would’ve chosen another path entirely.
Hard to imagine, but we’ll never know.
Essentially, the equation is “no marriage to Jane = no Vonnegut books”.
Lesson: A two-person karass is called a duprass.
“A true duprass,” Bokonon tells us, “can’t be invaded, not even by children born of such a union.”
Cat’s Cradle, Ch. 41Kurt Vonnegut’s nuclear family. Not much has been said about Kurt’s relationship to the family he started with Jane. Kurt and Jane had three children: Edith, Nanette, and Mark.
Mark is also a writer, and published The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, a memoir of his experiences setting up a commune in British Columbia, while dealing with schizophrenia.
In 1958, Kurt’s sister Edith died of cancer. In a freak accident, Edith’s husband, James, was killed when his train derailed in New York City. Kurt and Jane adopted Edith and James’ children, four boys.
In Unstuck in Time, Kurt is described as being as mostly reclusive and moody, spending most of his daylight hours in his writing studio, hacking away on his typewriter at short stories and novels, smoking an endless stream Pall Malls. Occasionally, he would come outside to scream at the children if he felt they were being too loud.
Other times, he was a lively, engaging, and silly father who would entertain children and neighbors alike with his antics and oratory.
Lesson: Unclear. Possibly it is this: sometimes you may find your karass by making a tough decision and doing the right thing.
One might speculate that the rambunctious energy of the seven children at Kurt and Jane’s Cape Cod household had an effect on Kurt’s writing. More specifically, it probably made him lighten up a bit.
Undoubtedly, it must have been awful to see his four nephews left parent-less after his sister and brother-in-law died. He also loved his sister dearly.
Kurt may have felt it was his duty to take in his nephews, and perhaps this was a factor in his decision to essentially abandon his family with Jane around the time Slaughterhouse-Five was published.The Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In 1965, Kurt Vonnegut was still virtually unknown. His books were out of print. He lived in suburban Cape Cod with seven kids and his wife, Jane. He was dead broke.
Vonnegut was accepted into the program as a teacher and writer-in-residence, joining literary luminaries as Nelson Algren and Norman Mailer. The gainful employment was a lifeline, but the real boon was the karass of world-class authors Vonnegut joined during his two years in the program.
Being a part of the Writer’s Workshop forced Vonnegut to “deeply reconsider his creative process”, and allowed him to make the transition from “sleazo sci-fi hack”, to the world-famous writer we know today.
Lesson: Sometimes we got both the karass we need, and the karass we want. The right karass can make all the difference, but you’ve got to risk it to get the biscuit, as they say.
To Conclude: Thoughts on Finding Your Karass
To summarize the lessons from the exploration of Vonnegut’s own five most important karasses:
You might already be in a karass and not even know it. This could be your immediate family, you and a small group of people you regularly interact with at your workplace, or even, say, a group of guys that you play pick-up basketball with. This karass may serve the function of simply preparing you for a greater karass in the future. Keep your eyes and ears open–you may well already be on a mission from God.
Being in a karass isn’t always fun. A karass can even be abysmal, brutal, depressing. It can make you question your beliefs. To live is to suffer.
So it goes, so it goes.Being in a duprass can be as powerful as any karass. If you find yourself in a two-person karass, consider yourself lucky. A duprass is a rare type of bond. Many never experience the comfort, care, and transformative power of being in a duprass.
A duprass can change you. It can allow you to reach your full potential in a way that nothing else can.
Also, just like all karasses, all duprasses must eventually come to an end.Your mission in a karass may not always be clear. In fact, it rarely is, and usually only after the fact. You’ve just got to do the right thing and hope for the best.
The truest karass is one where you join a community that allows you to reach your full potential(but you must first take the risk!). It’s entirely possible you will have to brave your way through some granfalloons on your way. You may get discouraged, or begin to despair that you will never find your people.
There are no guarantees. No karass lasts forever.
But man, when you find a good one, there’s nothing better.
Thank You for Reading TTSE!
I want to thank a bunch of friends who subscribed last week: Fardeen, Lizzy, Jeannot, Will, Steve, Mikhail, Abby, Comrade BB, Katy, and Greg C.
It means a lot y’all! ♥️
I write this newsletter for you. I hope you found this issue interesting. I’d love to know what you liked, and what you’d like to see more of.
In the future, I plan to offer a paid subscription if I can sustain publishing 1-2 articles per week for the next 2-3 months.
For now, you can support this newsletter by purchasing any of the books or films mentioned in this post via the Amazon links in the post.
Thanks and enjoy the rest of your week. Let me know if you end up finding your karass!
Alex