"Go Find the Others"
Thoughts on "finding your people" to join or build a community, and some practical ways that I go about it
This post is part of an on-going “blog-to-book” writing process, for a book I’m writing, called “How to Buy Land With Your Friends”. Here’s the outline. The doc is open to commenting if you want to leave feedback. This post is a rough draft of Chapter Four, titled “Gathering Your People”.
Also, I am looking to go on podcasts to talk about: “buying land with your friends”, regional interdependence, and community. If you have a pod(or you know someone), give me a shout!
Let’s say you have a dream of living in a beautiful place, where friends are close by…and it’s affordable.
In 2023, this might seem like quite the lofty goal, if you don’t already own property and/or are retired. It’s practically a pipe dream for anyone who doesn’t work in tech, finance, medicine, or law.
Maybe you dream of owning a home or some land, but it seems out of reach for a variety of reasons:
Housing is too expensive to buy(much less rent) in the areas where your friends and family live
The homes that are affordable are in small towns or rural areas where you don’t know anyone. These small-towns may seem legitimately scary or hostile depending on how you identify. (See: Tenacious Unicorn Ranch)
You don’t work remotely, so moving to some faraway place with few employment opportunities doesn’t seem like the best idea
Buying and building on raw land seems either daunting, lonely, or both
I’ve collected these reasons from people that I’ve talked to that share this dream.
I share this dream too. Last year, when I had a soul-killing tech job, I was looking at financing some property in the Northeastern US.
I was starting to do some research and set up viewings, but it’s a good thing that I didn’t buy a house, because I was laid off last June.
And even if I hadn’t been laid off, I would’ve been stuck in that job until I could find another soul-killing tech job(I have concluded they are all soul-killing, for me, personally), and until I’d paid off my mortgage in 10-30 years.
Granted, I would love to have a house.
But I think it would’ve been more of a curse than a blessing in that instance.
Since then, I’ve been taking unemployment and working on this newsletter. I applied for a small business funding program using this newsletter as my small business and it doubled the length of my unemployment–so that’s one silver lining.
Since then, I made plans to leave NYC for good, and to visit Creator Cabins in the Texas Hill Country for two months. From there I was planning to travel up the West Coast, and visit different intentional communities and land projects.
Here’s a moment from today at Cabin. Recently, I was deputized as feeder of the two bulls on the property, while Jon and Lauren, the property’s owners, are away.
It was a half-baked plan, to be honest. I was so burnt out and tired in NYC, it seemed like my best option to roam. I planned to continue working remotely and writing this newsletter from the road, reporting on the land projects I visited and creating content around that.
My dream was–and it still is–to find an intentional community or land project where I can build a small house to put down more permanent roots.
I would say that, in my life right now, I am immersed day-to-day in the process of “finding the others”.
I’d say it’s a big part of what this newsletter is about: how to do it, why to do it, how to deepen new and existing friendships and relationships.
Maybe “go find the others” is still a bit vague here, so allow me to give more context in the next section.
What Does It Mean to “Go Find the Others”?
If you’re a “mildly-to-very-online” person, you may have seen come across this phrase before.
The earliest known instance of the phrase I can find is attributed to Timothy Leary.
“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
I’ll admit that this kind of sentiment can read as cliché in this day and age–like an early Apple commercial, or a modern Nike commercial. I can already picture the worn denim and the tragically-handsome models, filmed in an impressionistic and romantic black-and-white handheld style.
Ad agencies have long since recuperated this kind of language and sold it back to us, so that we buy products, in the hopes that our purchases will free us, even just a little.
Despite the cultural baggage a sentiment like this carries, I like this quote. I think if you can get past the 60’s-hippie-drug-culture vibe of it, there’s some powerful truth here. I think that if this quote were attributed to, say, Arundhati Roy, it would feel less trite.
I’d guess that more people feel like this in America than ever. I’d assert that we’re at an unprecedented point in this country’s history where there is no mainstream.
The mainstream narratives that existed from the 50’s up until the last 5 years or so have been fractured by social media, into a kaleidoscope of viewpoints, disinformation, edutainment, and other kinds of “content”.
Perhaps in any society, there is a swath of folks that yearn for deeper meaning in their lives, and are willing to search for it, tirelessly.
If meaning is found in our relationships with each other, that gives us a powerful and motivating reason to go find the others.
How to Go Find The Others
Hopefully that was an adequate explanation/exploration of what “go find the others” means, and why it’s worthwhile.
I’ve explained why I’ve embraced this idea–to find an intentional community to join and put down roots, or in lieu of that, to find 5-10 committed folks to start our own.
And here’s how I’m going about it:
Posting on Twitter
Joining group chats and Discords, introducing myself, and joining conversations.
Talking to strangers. The topic of “buying land with your friends” seems to come up a lot with people my age and younger.
I’ve met so many interesting, kind people on Twitter. I wouldn’t say I’m any sort of social media or Twitter master, but I’ve talked with more people than I can count over the past few years, that I’ve been active on Twitter, on a more or less daily basis.
In my own experience, I’ve been consistently surprised, over and over again, in dm’ing people who I think are cool and thoughtful. It’s sort of a Twitter norm, at least in tech Twitter and TPOT(“that part of Twitter”), to have a short dm conversation, and then ask to jump on a video call.
Paul Millerd’s concept of the “curiosity conversation”(Paul cites Brian Grazer’s book, A Curious Mind) is a nice way to think about connecting with friendly internet people.
I’d also advocate for writing and putting your own thoughts online, via Twitter, Substack, and/or whatever other formats feel intuitively right to you.
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