Meandering

Thoughts on a Journey to Understand the Loneliness of the Twenty-First Century

I think we have accidentally engineered a colder world.

I don’t mean worse. In almost every measurable way, I prefer the world we have built. I like Amazon, online banking, GPS, streaming, Uber and being able to ask an artificial intelligence at eleven o’clock at night why I remember a particular episode of The Flintstones. I have no desire to stand in line at a bank again, and I don’t think civilization will be improved by making me ask a gas station attendant for directions to Sudbury.

But I think that while we were removing friction from modern life, we removed something else without noticing it: people. Not our families and close friends, but the other people, that enormous population of people we used to know a little.

I think that loss has something to do with why the twenty-first century can feel strangely lonely even while it is more connected, more convenient and more individually empowering than anything that came before it. I also think we can fix it without surrendering any of the things that made this world better.

That’s where I’m going.

I got there by wondering what happened to the doubleheader.

Yes, that’s quite a hard turn. Get used to it. There are a lot of these coming. This is an essay, so there is a direction, but as the title promises, we’re going to meander.

The doubleheader seemed as good a place to start as any.

It Was a Doubleheader

There is an episode of The Flintstones I have remembered since childhood in which Fred and Barney desperately want to get out of work to see a baseball doubleheader.

I didn’t see it in its original run. Like an enormous amount of the culture my generation absorbed, I saw The Flintstones in syndication, where the same episodes came around often enough to become part of childhood memory.

They lie. One lie requires another and the entire thing becomes an increasingly elaborate disaster involving illness, hospitals and Fred impersonating a doctor. Eventually, of course, everything collapses, and what I remember most is Fred’s defence:

It was a doubleheader.

Does everyone even know what a doubleheader is anymore? Two baseball games, same teams, same day, one after the other. Traditionally, one ticket got you both games. It wasn’t merely two games scheduled together. The doubleheader was an event. You settled in for the afternoon.

They used to be common enough that The Flintstones could build an entire episode around Fred desperately trying to get to one without having to explain why anyone would care. But where did the doubleheader go? For that matter, where did the double feature go?

Two movies for the price of one. Not a promotion or a special package, just a perfectly ordinary way movies were shown.

Once I started thinking about those two things, I began noticing how many other perfectly ordinary things had quietly disappeared.

Rain checks, for example.

The expression itself is a little surviving piece of the old world. “I’ll take a rain check” comes from the literal rain checks issued when an event, originally a baseball game, was rained out. Your ticket entitled you to come back another day.

Retailers borrowed the idea. If a store advertised something on sale and ran out, it would give you a rain check entitling you to buy it later at the advertised price. This wasn’t some obscure courtesy either. It was sufficiently expected that advertisements sometimes had to warn you: NO RAIN CHECKS.

There it is again, a little piece of customer accommodation that was once common enough that its absence required disclosure. We still use the expression. We just don’t see many actual rain checks.

Then I began remembering other things. Layaway. Free gift wrapping. Free alterations. Someone pumping your gas and cleaning the windshield. Hotels cashing your cheque because you were staying there. Businessmen getting a day room for a few hours to rest up after a meeting and before the flight. A flight, I will add, where a mile flown equalled a mile earned... how’s that for living in the past? Your ticket also included your luggage, your seat and something approximating a meal.

At Miracle Food Mart, you didn’t even take your groceries to the car. They were placed into a bin and disappeared down a conveyor system, rather like luggage at an airport. You went outside, got into your car and drove around to the pickup area, where you were reunited with your groceries and someone loaded them into your trunk.

Think about the infrastructure involved in that: the building, the conveyor, the bins, the loading area and, most importantly for where this essay is going, the people. All so that a middle-class family buying groceries didn’t have to haul them across a parking lot. It would boggle the mind to see a supermarket build something like that today.

It is missed.

Bell would let you place a person-to-person call. Think about what that meant. You weren’t asking Bell to connect you to a telephone number, you were asking them to find a person. An operator might call one number, discover the person wasn’t there, then try another number on your behalf, and you weren’t charged for the long-distance call unless they actually found the person you were trying to reach.

Because, quite reasonably, Bell understood that you couldn’t be expected to pay for a conversation you didn’t have. Imagine explaining that business model today.

And if something was seriously wrong with dinner, the manager didn’t offer you 15 percent off your next visit through an app. They tore up the cheque. The transaction was over. You were their guest, something had gone wrong and they were embarrassed by it. There was no coupon designed to make sure you came back and spent more money, no survey and no case number.

They tore up the cheque.

At Clevelands House in Muskoka, where my family vacationed when I was a boy, we had a waitress assigned to our table. There was a man from the bar in a red jacket. There were bellmen and desk clerks and staff everywhere, mixed in with families who stayed long enough that everybody began to recognize everybody else.

This wasn’t the Ritz. This was middle-class family tourism in Ontario.

Initially I thought I had discovered an article about getting ripped off. Look at everything we used to get. Companies have spent decades identifying things that were once included in the price, separating them and either charging us for them, automating them or making us do them ourselves.

There is certainly an article there.

But this isn’t that article.

Because after making the list for a while, I realized I didn’t care very much about most of it. I can carry my suitcase. I can put groceries into the car. I don’t own a chequebook, so the fact that a hotel will no longer cash my cheque is not keeping me awake at night, and I actively prefer online banking to interacting with a teller.

The thing I missed wasn’t the service. I missed the people who performed it.

Where Did Everybody Go?

The bag boy wasn’t my friend. Neither was the cashier, the gas-station attendant, the bank teller, the bus driver, the waitress, the bartender, the butcher or the man at the airline counter, but they weren’t all strangers either.

That distinction seems important now because we’ve lost an enormous amount of the territory that once existed between those two words.

There was family, close friends and friends, but then there were neighbours, colleagues, acquaintances, the barber, the mechanic, the waitress, the bartender, the woman at the bakery, the teller at the bank, the guy at the hardware store, the cashier who knew your kids, the bus driver you saw every morning and the person whose name you never learned but whose face you saw every Tuesday for fifteen years. Then, finally, there were strangers.

It was a spectrum. Now I sometimes feel as though there are my people and eight billion strangers.

My Uber driver is a stranger. The Amazon driver is a stranger. The person filling my grocery order is invisible. My bank is an app. My landlord could be a corporation. The customer-service representative is whoever happens to receive the ticket. Even where the human being remains, the system is generally designed to make that person interchangeable.

I can take a hundred Uber rides with a hundred different drivers and every transaction can work perfectly without one of those people moving a millimetre closer to becoming someone I know.

This is different from saying I don’t have friends. I do. What I have lost is granularity. There are fewer kinds of people in my life, and one of the kinds I miss most is my guy.

Tell Him I Sent You

Everybody used to have a guy. If the furnace was making that noise, you had a guy. Need a mechanic? Call my guy. Plumber, accountant, dentist, lawyer, butcher, contractor, travel agent, somebody who could find the weird part for the old car, somebody who knew somebody at City Hall.

And then came one of the great sentences of ordinary social life:

Tell him I sent you.

I almost never hear that anymore.

“My guy” wasn’t necessarily a friend. That’s what made the relationship interesting. He occupied one of those positions in the middle of the spectrum, and he had a reputation.

Reputation meant something slightly different before we had reputation systems. If I sent you to my plumber, I was lending you a little of my relationship with him. He had a reason to look after you because I had sent you, and you had a reason not to behave terribly because you’d arrived carrying my name. If he did a good job, he might become your plumber too. Eventually somebody would ask you if you knew a plumber and you’d say, “Absolutely. I’ve got a guy.”

The web thickened.

Today I can find hundreds of plumbers in seconds and read thousands of reviews, and let’s be clear, this is often better. My friend’s recommendation is one data point. Google can give me four thousand. The old networks could be nepotistic, exclusionary and spectacularly wrong. Sometimes your guy was an idiot.

Online reputation systems have solved the information problem brilliantly, but they have replaced reputation with reputation data. Nobody sent me, no relationship is being lent and nobody enters my network. The plumber fixes the sink, I leave five stars and we disappear from each other’s lives. The transaction may actually be better, but the web doesn’t get any thicker because of it.

We Used to Need Each Other

For almost all of human history, other people were where the information lived. If you wanted to know what the weather was going to be tomorrow, where you should eat, how to get somewhere, who was a good plumber, whether the hotel was any good or what happened downtown, you asked someone.

Even trivial uncertainty generated human contact.

This was a terrible information system in many respects. People gave awful directions. They repeated nonsense. They recommended their cousins.

I can’t tell you how many times I pulled over to ask someone for directions, listened carefully, thanked them and drove away. Isobel would wait until we were out of sight and ask, “Do you remember all that?”

“There is no way we’re listening to him.”

And then we’d ask someone else... but only after we’d driven out of view, because you didn’t want to be rude.

Google is better. GPS is better. Weather apps are better. Online reviews are better. But notice what just happened: we got lost and talked to two people. Today we don’t get lost, which is better, but we also don’t talk to the two people.

That’s the part that never appeared on the specification sheet and now I am having a long conversation about human isolation with an artificial intelligence. Which seems almost too perfect.

Technology has gradually broken one of the oldest equations in human life: I need something, therefore I need somebody.

Now I need something and I get it. That’s progress, but I think we’ve made an enormous conceptual mistake along the way. We removed our need for people without removing our need to be among people.

The cashier appeared on the supermarket spreadsheet as labour cost, as did the bag boy and the teller. The travel agent appeared as distribution cost and the doorman as labour cost. Nobody’s spreadsheet contained a line saying “person I know,” so the value was zero.

Each individual decision was rational. Nobody decided to make society lonely. We optimized it into loneliness.

We Don’t Even Have to Ask

There is another side to this that I find increasingly strange. Not only do I no longer need to ask other people what they know, increasingly nobody needs to ask me what I know either.

Every restaurant wants my review. Every hotel wants my feedback. Every Uber driver rates me and I rate the driver. Amazon wants to know what I thought of the toaster, Google wants to know whether the restaurant was good, the airline wants a survey, the dentist sends one and the hotel sends another. Every transaction seems to end with somebody asking me to deposit my experience into a database.

At first glance this looks almost aggressively social. Everyone wants to know what I think, except nobody actually wants to ask me. They want the information separated from me.

Once I have reviewed the restaurant, you don’t need to ask me whether it was good. Once enough of us have rated the hotel, nobody needs to say, “Douglas stayed there last year. Ask him what he thought.” My experience has been extracted, aggregated, scored and made permanently available to people I will never meet.

We used to store an enormous amount of the world’s useful information inside people, and that gave people value to one another. You needed someone who had been there, someone who knew the neighbourhood, someone who had tried the restaurant, someone whose cousin had stayed at the hotel, someone who remembered what happened last time or someone who knew a guy.

Now we’re steadily saving ourselves to the net: what I bought, where I went, what I liked and hated, what I watched, what I searched for, what I thought of dinner, which photographs I took, who I know, what music I played, what I wrote and what I said. Given enough of that history, increasingly sophisticated systems can reconstruct a remarkably useful approximation of me without requiring my presence at all.

My mother has been dead for nearly five years, and I suspect I could still find her opinion of restaurants I didn’t even know she had visited.

Think about how strange that is. There was a time when, if I wanted to know what my mother thought of a restaurant, I had to ask my mother. The information and the person were inseparable, whereas now the opinion can outlive the person.

There is something rather wonderful about that. There are traces of my mother in the world that didn’t disappear when she did. But viewed from the other direction, it reveals how profound the change has been. We used to need the person to get the information. Now we can keep the information without the person.

And when information travelled through people, something else travelled with it: relationship.

If I told you, “Go there. Tell them I sent you,” I had put a little of myself behind the recommendation. If you had a terrible evening, I would probably hear about it. There was consequence.

Maybe my smartwatch should give me a tiny electric shock every time somebody has a bad experience at a restaurant I recommended online. Not that I intend to wear a smartwatch, but at least it would put me back into the loop.

Because that’s what we’ve been removing. Information used to travel from person to person and, in doing so, create or reinforce a relationship. Now information travels perfectly well by itself.

That is enormously useful. I use reviews constantly and I don’t want to give them up, but once again we solved the stated problem and ignored an incidental output. We wanted the information. It turned out that having to get it from another human being was producing relationships.

There is something particularly unsettling about realizing that the technological trajectory isn’t merely toward a world in which I need fewer people. It’s toward a world in which fewer people need me, not because I have nothing to contribute, but because increasingly what I might contribute has already been captured, indexed and made available without the inconvenience of asking me.

For most of history, if you wanted Douglas’s experience, you needed Douglas. You might have to call me, invite me to dinner or run into me and remember there was something you wanted to ask. Once we were talking, I might tell you something you hadn’t thought to ask and you might tell me something in return. Information was the excuse for the encounter, not necessarily its limit.

We have become extraordinarily information-rich while becoming less informationally dependent upon one another, and dependence is an uncomfortable word. Modernity has quite reasonably spent centuries trying to free us from unnecessary dependence. But perhaps a little mutual dependence was part of the glue. Not helplessness or gatekeeping, just enough incompleteness that occasionally I had something you needed, you had something I needed, and we had to talk.

Fred Flintstone Was Richer Than I Am

This is where The Flintstones came back into the story.

Forget the doubleheader for a moment and look at Fred’s life. He has a wife and young child. His best friend, Barney, lives next door and their wives are friends. Fred and Barney bowl together and belong to the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes. Fred has relationships at the quarry. His boss can be invited to dinner. There are bridge nights, neighbours, social obligations and people constantly wandering in and out of one another’s lives.

Fred’s different worlds overlap. Barney isn’t filed under FRIEND and encountered only when Fred schedules a friendship activity. He’s the neighbour, best friend, fellow Water Buffalo and co-conspirator. Work crosses into home, neighbourhood crosses into friendship, the lodge crosses into leisure, Wilma’s relationships cross into Fred’s and Pebbles connects another generation.

Of course this is a sitcom and writers need recurring characters. But the writers could use these institutions without explaining them because the audience recognized them. A lodge wasn’t an exotic social intervention, bridge night wasn’t therapy for loneliness and having the boss over for dinner wasn’t bizarre. These were simply things people did.

And I’m not using television to invent a world that didn’t exist.

My mother belonged to an amateur theatre group in Mississauga. At one point they were working on a production of Cabaret, and I don’t remember her ever being happier. There were rehearsals, people to know, things that had to get done and somewhere she was expected to be. The play was almost beside the point. It gave them a reason to keep assembling.

My father belonged to the Thorncliffe Ski Club. They skied, travelled, played baseball and did whatever else a ski club somehow ended up doing. He liked some of the members and couldn’t stand others, which is important. These weren’t carefully selected friends. They were simply fixtures in his life, and therefore in mine, until I was a teenager.

Then my father discovered the Canadian Opera Company and started disappearing for days with his best friend John so they could sit around being extras. I once saw him on TVOntario, at about eleven o’clock at night, hand a sword to one of the principal characters and say, “Your sword.”

It was amazing.

These weren’t people looking for solutions to loneliness. My parents had things they belonged to. The thing itself could be almost absurdly specific. Skiing. Amateur theatre. Opera. But each came with a cast of recurring human beings.

I don’t have memories like that from my adult life.

Somewhere between their adulthood and mine, belonging stopped being something that ordinary life simply kept providing.

Fred did not need to realize that he was experiencing insufficient social connection and download an app to address it. His life kept throwing people at him.

By contemporary standards, Fred Flintstone was socially loaded.

And I want my Water Buffaloes.

The Cocoon

There is a natural answer to some of this, which is that I’m getting older. Of course I am, and life has always narrowed.

I started in nursery school and moved through school, camp, a group home for a while, university and early working life. I was constantly placed into groups. Grade Five gave me thirty peers. Camp put ten or twelve boys in a room. Nobody asked whether we were compatible.

Then people pair off, establish careers and have children, and the circles become smaller. That part is natural, but I’ve realized the curve isn’t simply a steady decline.

There is a cocoon in the middle.

When you have children, they generate an enormous social world around you: daycare parents, school parents, hockey parents, swimming parents, birthday parties, recitals, tournaments and fundraisers. For years I had friendships created by my children’s activities that felt quite substantial.

Then the children stopped swimming and the swimming parents disappeared. Nobody fought and nobody decided the friendship was over. There simply wasn’t the need for people who could grab your kid if traffic was bad, or the social demand to remember Julie’s father’s name when you saw him at drop-off.

And that’s when you discover that some relationships were almost leased from the institution that kept putting you together. They were real relationships, but they had a job to do. A few survive independently, while most become shadows of the cocoon that created them.

Then the children grow up and leave, which is normally discussed as a transition between parent and child, but something else leaves with them: the last great automatic acquaintance machine of middle adulthood.

I find myself approaching an empty nest in my mid-fifties feeling much younger than the traditional idea I had of someone in his mid-fifties, and wondering where the next institution is supposed to be. There is no Grade Thirteen for fifty-five-year-olds, no dormitory and no camp, and I’m not ready for the retirement community.

Curiously, at the far end of life we seem to have rediscovered the answer. Look at the retirement communities in Florida. Their days can be absolutely packed with people: coffee, cards, swimming, golf, pickleball, drinks, dinner, somebody’s birthday, somebody who needs a ride and somebody with gossip.

My mother experienced something similar later in her life. Her days were full of friendships. Booking time with her was like getting a table at the best restaurant in town. She lived alone, but she was about as far from lonely as you can get.

So perhaps the curve falls off a cliff and then eventually rises again. We have built enormous social infrastructure for children and increasingly sophisticated social infrastructure for older people. The middle gets a house, Netflix and instructions to put itself out there.

And even those ends are thinner than they were.

Where’s the Dance?

My children went through most of middle school and high school without school dances. There was a dance around graduation, organized by parents, and I actually complained to the principal about the absence of dances. The answer was essentially that they were too much trouble.

Of course they were. Teenagers plus darkness plus music has presumably been too much trouble since the invention of music.

But that answer began bothering me for the same reason everything else in this essay bothers me. The dance is trouble. The band costs money. The football team needs coaches. The club needs a teacher willing to stay late. The school play consumes enormous effort. The trip creates liability. The assembly takes time away from instruction.

One by one, institutions identify the peripheral things they do and ask whether those things are really part of the core mission. A school’s core mission is education, so it educates. A bank’s mission is financial transactions, so it transacts. A supermarket’s mission is selling groceries, so it sells them. A hotel’s mission is renting rooms, so it rents them.

Each becomes extremely good at its core function, and the world gets colder because perhaps we’ve mistaken the core function for the whole function.

A school was also supposed to give you a dance, a terrible football team, a band that wasn’t very good, a ridiculous musical, a club, a cafeteria table and a song. Brian Wilson could write Be True to Your School and millions of people understood the emotion because it was your school.

We have become extraordinarily sophisticated about asking young people who they are. What is your identity? What describes you? What makes you distinct? I’m beginning to wonder whether we have neglected the complementary question: what are you a member of? Not what describes you. What are you part of?

Fred Flintstone had answers. Husband, father, quarry worker, neighbour, Water Buffalo, bowler, friend of Barney, citizen of Bedrock. Each answer contained actual people.

An identity category isn’t necessarily a group identity. A group exists when particular people expect one another to show up.

We Broke the Age Mix

The groups that remain have also become remarkably segregated by life stage. Children inhabit children’s institutions, parents inhabit parenting institutions, middle-aged adults largely fend for themselves and older people eventually enter institutions for older people. They barely touch.

That wasn’t always true. Churches, neighbourhoods, lodges, service clubs, local businesses, extended families, resorts and community organizations put different generations into the same physical and social worlds. A twelve-year-old could know a seventy-year-old who wasn’t his grandfather. An older person could know children who weren’t grandchildren. A fifty-year-old could have recurring relationships with twenty-year-olds who weren’t employees or relatives.

We’ve built increasingly efficient social silos, and that’s another reason Clevelands House glows in my memory. It was mixed. Staff and guests, children and adults, young employees and older guests, families and couples. Everybody occupied the same place long enough for faces to become familiar.

It wasn’t simply populated. It was entangled.

The Great Inversion

There is another part of this that I find almost perverse.

Historically, poor people were chock-a-block full of other people, often horribly so. Several generations under one roof, shared bedrooms, tenements, boarding houses, factories, markets, streetcars, churches, pubs and neighbours constantly within earshot. Privacy was a luxury.

Money bought distance: your own bedroom, your own house, your own carriage, your own automobile, your own land. At the extreme stood the rich man alone on the mountain, interacting mostly with the servants required to maintain his isolation.

Now we’ve inverted it.

Technology has democratized the rich man’s isolation. A person of modest means can bank alone, shop alone, work alone, entertain himself alone and order dinner alone. The landlord can be a corporation. The groceries arrive from a platform. The driver is algorithmically assigned and disappears afterward. The delivery can be left outside so that neither person even has to say hello.

Meanwhile, I have a very wealthy friend and have occasionally had the privilege of travelling inside his bubble, and I noticed something. There wasn’t a Coke Zero on the entire trip that was any better than the one in my refrigerator.

What was different was the number of people he interacted with who genuinely cared about his needs, and he theirs.

The captain knew him, the driver expected him and the hotel manager came out to greet him. When the flight attendant spoke to him, she didn’t run the script I get. The same basic work was being done, but one was a transaction and the other was a connection. There was a crew on the boat. People knew how he liked things, knew where he was going and noticed that he had arrived. And he knew them.

We call this service, which makes it sound as though the luxury is that he doesn’t have to procure his own nuts or put the Jet Ski in the water. That’s not what struck me. His life was thick with recurring human beings who cared about him, and whom he cared about.

The rich can still buy something resembling a village. The rest of us got the app.

The app is fantastic, but it’s awfully quiet in here.

Fight Club

Which made me think differently about Fight Club.

The Narrator begins with an extraordinarily modern life: job, apartment, money, travel, autonomy and possessions selected from a catalogue to construct an identity. Functionally, everything works, but nobody needs him and he needs nobody. He encounters “single-serving friends” on airplanes, people designed to disappear from his life when the transaction ends, and he cannot sleep.

Then he discovers support groups. He goes somewhere, the same kinds of people are there, there are rituals, someone holds him, he cries and he sleeps.

Then he builds Fight Club.

What does he actually build? A community with rules, rituals, shared language, physical contact, obligation and a place you’re expected to appear. He moves from a sterile condominium containing one man and his furniture into a decrepit house overflowing with people.

And then the film shows us the danger. Fight Club becomes Project Mayhem. Belonging becomes identity and identity becomes obedience. Tyler takes the hunger for connection and weaponizes it.

Perhaps that’s part of what happens when ordinary society stops supplying enough low-voltage belonging. People don’t stop needing to belong, they find high-voltage versions: political movements, grievance communities, online tribes, conspiracy movements, talk radio.

And religion, although religion is more complicated.

Whatever one thinks about what happens upstairs, religion spent several thousand years developing some spectacular social technology. You go somewhere at a particular time and the same people return next week. There are children and old people. Someone is sick, someone needs a casserole and someone knows a roofer. Then you go downstairs into the basement for coffee and tea with women wearing some of the nicest hats you’ve ever seen.

I increasingly suspect the basement was doing an enormous amount of the work.

The people there didn’t need to become your friends. They just needed to stop being strangers. Thirty little places to belong may be considerably healthier than desperately needing one place to tell you who you are.

We Need Reefs

Rapid social and technological change has bleached the coral reef of ordinary human life. That doesn’t mean the people disappeared. They’re still swimming around. What’s missing is the substrate around which relationships used to grow.

When people try to restore a damaged reef, they don’t manufacture a mature ecosystem one coral at a time and lower it carefully into the ocean. Sometimes they sink a ship. They put structure into suitable water and give life somewhere to attach.

That is what I think we need to do socially. We need to sink ships.

We need social substrate: places and institutions where the same imperfectly selected people repeatedly encounter one another long enough for familiarity to accumulate, and they need to be intergenerational.

Creating a loneliness program for fifty-five-year-old empty nesters would reproduce precisely the mistake I’m complaining about. I don’t want to be placed in a room containing twenty-three optimized versions of myself. I want the fifteen-year-old who knows how to fix something, the thirty-year-old with the baby, the seventy-five-year-old with an outrageous story, the woman I don’t particularly like but have nevertheless known for six years and the guy who knows a guy.

The objective isn’t friendship. It’s fewer strangers.

Which brings me, with enormous reluctance, to pickleball.

I would rather eat my own liver than play pickleball. Nevertheless, I am forced to concede that the pickleball people may have accidentally discovered something important. It is relatively accessible, people rotate, there is time between games, different ages can participate and people return regularly. Familiarity accumulates around an activity whose stated purpose isn’t please make friends now.

Fine. Study it. Extract whatever social chemistry is working and apply it to something I might actually want to do: food, repair, gardening, music, games, making things, local history, community meals, amateur theatre, dogs, bad sports, anything. The particular activity is almost beside the point.

The reef needs substrate.

The Old Community Was an Accident

There is one enormous advantage the new world has over the old one: we can finally be intentional about this.

The social world I remember so fondly wasn’t designed. It was mostly an accident of geography, institutions and necessity. These were the children on my street, so I played with them. These were the boys at camp, so I lived with them. These were the parents whose children swam with mine, so we stood beside one another for years. This was my neighbour, so eventually I knew him.

Sometimes those accidents produced the Barney next door and sometimes they didn’t. For most of history, we couldn’t do much better. Finding the forty people in Toronto with whom I might have some peculiar but meaningful affinity would have required information nobody possessed, searches nobody could perform and more cognitive effort than any sane person would expend assembling a social life.

Technology has changed that.

We have spent decades building an astonishingly detailed record of human preference: what we read, what we watch, where we eat, what makes us laugh, what we buy and don’t buy, the places everybody loves that Tanya and I both hate, the obscure subjects Jeff and I independently disappear into for three hours on a Sunday afternoon.

The computer can see patterns across millions of tiny decisions that neither of us could possibly hold in our heads, and mostly we use this extraordinary capability to decide which shoes to show me.

Perhaps we’re thinking much too small.

Consider restaurant reviews. The system already knows that everyone loves a particular restaurant except Doug, Jeff and Tanya. That’s interesting. Perhaps Tanya also hated that other place everybody loved, and Doug hated it too.

Over time these shouldn’t merely be anonymous data points. They could become people whose judgement has acquired meaning. The system could tell me, “This restaurant has spectacular reviews, but Tanya didn’t like it, and Tanya’s taste has matched yours seventeen times out of twenty. Doug didn’t like it either. We don’t think you will.”

Now Tanya matters.

I don’t necessarily need to become Tanya’s friend, but she has moved one notch along the spectrum from stranger toward someone I know. Eventually I know that Tanya hates overproduced restaurants, Jeff has inexplicably terrible taste in hotels and Douglas is the person to ask about somewhere for dinner in Montreal. Those aren’t merely recommendations anymore. They’re the beginnings of reputations.

We already possess the machinery required to do this. We collect the opinions, identify the patterns and know who agrees with whom, but instead of allowing those patterns to create modest relationships between actual people, we grind everybody into the aggregate and return a number.

4.6 stars.

We have taken an extraordinarily rich human network and turned it into a decimal. I don’t want to abolish the decimal because it’s useful. I want Tanya back.

I don’t want seventeen million people to know that Douglas liked a restaurant. I want the seventeen people for whom that fact might actually mean something to know. Maybe three already know me, four have discovered that we reliably like the same restaurants, one lives around the corner and another has recommended five places I’ve loved.

Maybe I don’t know any of them yet.

Why should the system’s only ambition be to average us? It knows enough to notice that perhaps we belong near one another. We built machines that are extraordinarily good at discovering affinity, then mostly used them to decide what to sell us next.

What a waste.

There’s somebody for everybody, we like to say. Perhaps, for the first time in history, we actually have a reasonable chance of finding those somebodies.

Not through a questionnaire that discovers we both enjoy travel and long walks. The data is vastly richer than that. It contains thousands of tiny revealed preferences accumulated over years, not merely what I say I like but what I actually return to, what makes me laugh, what I linger over and what I reject when almost everyone else approves.

The machine might know that Tanya and I should know one another before either of us does, and that creates an opportunity human beings have never really had. We can finally be intentional about relationships at a scale and with a degree of subtlety that previously exceeded our information, time and cognitive capacity.

Not by calculating my perfect friends. I don’t want seventeen people algorithmically certified as Douglas-compatible. That sounds unbearable. Difference matters, accident matters and the person who surprises me matters. The mildly annoying person who has been coming every Thursday for six years may matter enormously.

But technology can improve the odds of the encounter.

Find the right people, then do something wonderfully old-fashioned and put them in a room. Not once, because that’s networking. Put them there next Thursday and the Thursday after that. Give them something worth doing badly together, mix in people the algorithm wouldn’t have selected and let familiarity do its slow work. Let reputations form and obligations appear.

Eventually Tanya stops being the woman whose restaurant preferences correlate with mine.

She becomes Tanya.

Then turn the machine off.

The algorithm’s job isn’t to become the community. Its job is to help the community happen.

Chosen Belonging

Some versions of this already exist and others have been imagined for us.

Retirement communities such as The Villages in Florida demonstrate that people will enthusiastically reorganize their lives around places deliberately designed to produce repeated social contact. Whatever else one thinks about The Villages, its residents don’t seem to lack things to join.

Neal Stephenson imagined something more ambitious in The Diamond Age. His world is organized partly around phyles, communities people join through affinity rather than simply inheriting through geography or birth. The Neo-Victorians are one. Other phyles stretch across geography so that belonging doesn’t necessarily disappear when you cross a city or national border.

That idea has stayed with me because it suggests a third possibility between the village we were born into and the atomized individual we have become.

For most of history, community was assigned. You were born here, these were your neighbours, this was your church, these were your relatives, these were the children available to play with and these were the people at the factory, lodge, school or pub.

The great liberation of modernity was that increasingly we could leave.

Good.

But perhaps we confused the freedom to leave an assigned community with freedom from needing community at all.

What Stephenson imagined was community becoming elective. You don’t have to remain Catholic because your parents were Catholic. You don’t have to spend your life among the people who happened to be born within five miles of you. You can seek out a group because something about those people, their values, interests, temperament, aesthetics or way of living makes you want to belong there.

And crucially, the group isn’t merely an online forum. It has an address.

Imagine belonging to something that has a house in Toronto, apartments in Chicago, a building in Tokyo and a table somewhere in Paris. You arrive in another city and there are people there who are not quite friends and certainly aren’t strangers.

The internet gave us the first half of this. It allowed us to discover our people regardless of geography, but then, strangely, we mostly left them there on the internet.

Perhaps the next step is to bring them back into physical life.

There is a danger here. If the algorithm puts me exclusively among Douglas-compatible people, we’ve recreated one of the worst features of the internet in physical space. The reef needs biodiversity.

So perhaps the principle is intentional at the edges and accidental on the inside. Choose the community because something draws you there, then surrender some control.

Tanya comes on Thursdays. Jeff brings his terrible opinions about hotels. Somebody’s sixteen-year-old is there and somebody else is eighty-two. People bring spouses and friends and new people arrive. You don’t get to swipe left every time someone irritates you.

The technology gets you across the threshold. Then proximity, repetition and mild social obligation take over.

The old community was assigned and the current world is atomized. The opportunity now is something humanity has rarely had at scale: chosen belonging. Not merely finding my people online, but finding somewhere among them to live.

Things Worth Doing Badly Together

There is one quality I think these new institutions particularly need. They need to give us things worth doing badly together.

The school band doesn’t need to be excellent. Community theatre doesn’t need to be Broadway. The Water Buffaloes don’t need measurable outcomes. Our terrible football team is still our terrible football team.

Optimization works against this because why listen to my neighbour play guitar badly when Spotify contains every great guitarist who ever lived? Why watch local hockey when I can watch the NHL? Why attend amateur theatre when every great film is available on demand? Why ask someone where to eat when Google has reviewed every restaurant in the city?

The rational consumer choice repeatedly points toward the world’s best product and away from local participation. Consumption becomes spectacular while participation withers, but participation produces something consumption cannot.

It produces a we.

Our school, our street, our bar, our table, our team, our club, our ridiculous Christmas pageant, our guy.

We’ve become spectacular at constructing the I: my feed, my playlist, my recommendations, my preferences, my schedule, my identity, my experience, my AI. We haven’t become nearly as good at preserving the stupid little we, and perhaps those little plural pronouns were carrying more of civilization than we realized.

Xenia

Which brings me back much farther than Fred Flintstone.

One of the ideas running through The Odyssey is xenia, the ancient obligation between host and guest. A stranger arrives and the host has obligations toward him, while the guest has obligations in return. The interesting thing is precisely that they aren’t already friends. Hospitality creates a temporary bond between people who otherwise have no reason to care for one another.

The violation of that bond is serious enough in the Homeric world to destroy kingdoms.

That makes me think differently about the hotel cashing the cheque. The hotel wasn’t in the cheque-cashing business. It cashed your cheque because you were its guest.

Bell wasn’t being paid to search half a city for your uncle. It did it because the service it understood itself to be providing wasn’t a completed circuit between two telephone numbers. It was communication between two people.

The restaurant didn’t give you a coupon toward another transaction when dinner went badly. They tore up the cheque. The bellman carried the luggage because you were a guest. The grocer put your groceries onto a conveyor belt, sent them through the building and had another human being load them into your car because you had entrusted him with provisioning your household. The department store wrapped the present because you were its customer.

Calling these things services almost misses something. They were courtesies, and courtesy presupposes a relationship.

Once every courtesy is subjected to independent economic analysis, courtesy becomes extremely difficult to defend. You charge for it, automate it, make the customer do it or eliminate it.

Customers responded rationally too. If I’m not your guest and you’re not my grocer, if we’re merely counterparties exchanging an interchangeable commodity, why shouldn’t I cross the street to save a penny?

Businesses stopped treating customers as guests because customers behaved like transactions, and customers behaved increasingly like transactions because businesses stopped treating them as guests.

Somewhere along the way the host and the guest disappeared and we became providers and users instead. It sounds like a trivial change in vocabulary, but somewhere inside that transformation all those little relationships surrounding commerce disappeared with them.

The Christmas Lights

This is where I finally understood what had been bothering me.

Every Christmas I put incandescent lights on my tree. Technologically, this is idiotic. Incandescent lights are inefficient, they produce heat and they break. LEDs are superior in almost every engineering sense.

But LED lights make my tree look cold, and Christmas colder with it. So LEDs don’t touch a single branch.

I watch a YouTube channel called Technology Connections, and he has a great video where he finally explained to me what it was I hated. The problem wasn’t that LEDs were somehow vaguely less Christmassy. The colours were wrong. There wasn’t enough blue in the blue and there was too much red in the red.

Better still, he showed me a company that had fixed it.

That’s important. They didn’t fix Christmas lights by going back to incandescent bulbs. They figured out what the new technology had accidentally lost and engineered it back in.

Suddenly the whole thing became a rather good metaphor for what I had been trying to say about people.

I knew something felt colder before I knew what was missing.

This is something we seem to do whenever a new technology arrives. Its enthusiasts measure all the things the technology improves, declare complete victory and occasionally become irritated with anyone who says something was lost.

CDs will last forever. Social media will connect everybody. The paperless office is coming. The LED lasts vastly longer and consumes a fraction of the electricity.

All substantially true, and incomplete.

The problem is that we define the old thing according to the characteristics we know how to measure. The job of an incandescent bulb appears to be producing light, so we measure lumens, watts, lifespan and cost, and LED wins.

Except human beings had spent generations living under incandescent light, and there were characteristics of that light nobody had bothered putting into the specification because the old technology produced them automatically.

That’s what I think we did with modern life.

We optimized for the things we knew how to measure: price, speed, convenience, availability, efficiency. We didn’t put “number of recurring human beings in your life” on the specification sheet because the old system produced them automatically.

Then the replacement arrived and some of us started saying there’s something wrong with the light.

That is how I now feel about my life.

There’s something wrong with the light.

I can give you a thousand reasons why this life is superior to the one I grew up in, and I would not trade back for a million dollars. I want Amazon, online banking, GPS and streaming. I want the freedom to find obscure people and ideas anywhere in the world. I want the AI I’m talking to while working all this out.

The old social web had warmth, but it also had gatekeepers. Access to the good stuff could depend on making the right connections, knowing the right people or simply being sufficiently like everyone else to be let in. There were plenty of people standing outside that warm little village looking in.

I was often one of them.

I don’t want that back either.

I want the LED.

But life does not feel as thick as it once did.

At first I thought that was age, and then I looked around. The cashier disappeared, the bag boy disappeared, the teller disappeared, the station attendant disappeared and the travel agent disappeared. The lodge disappeared, the school dance disappeared, the club disappeared and the shared television program disappeared. My guy disappeared. “Tell him I sent you” disappeared. The generations separated and the parenting friendships evaporated when the children stopped swimming.

The institutions became very good at their core functions and abandoned their incidental ones. Nobody made a decision to create this outcome. We simply kept optimizing, and now we stand beneath the result wondering why everything feels so cold.

I don’t know yet exactly how to measure the missing wavelengths. Maybe they are repeated contact, human density, weak ties, recognition, shared experience, group identity and intergenerational contact. Maybe it’s the number of relationship gradations between intimate and stranger, how many people say your name in an ordinary week, how many familiar faces you encounter without arranging to encounter them, how many people would notice if you stopped showing up and how many people can tell someone else, “Tell him I sent you.”

Maybe what we call loneliness is actually a bundle of ten different missing wavelengths, but I don’t think the fact that we haven’t completely measured the problem means the feeling is imaginary. We have lived under both kinds of light. We know which one feels warmer.

So I refuse the choice.

I don’t want to go backward. I don’t want the old bank, worse information or gatekeepers. I don’t want technology removed from my life, and I don’t want every transaction stuffed with unnecessary human labour merely to force me into conversation.

But I also don’t want to be told that the only alternative to all that progress is accepting a world in which almost everyone I encounter is a stranger.

I want online banking and somewhere to go on Thursday. I want Amazon and I want my kids to have a school dance. I want AI and I want somebody who isn’t family or a close friend to notice that they haven’t seen me lately. I want technology clever enough not merely to recommend the restaurant but occasionally to introduce me to Tanya.

I want to choose my closest relationships and have enough unchosen people in my life to occasionally be irritated by them. I want privacy and I want a reef. I want my Water Buffaloes, I want my guy and I want someone to say, “Tell him I sent you.”

We don’t need to choose between progress and people. The old social web was dense but accidental. The new network is powerful but thin. For the first time, we may have the tools to combine them.

We don’t have to choose between the village and the network. We can use the network to build a better village.

Look at the cast of the Village People. There was a construction worker, a cowboy, a cop, a soldier, a biker and a Native American. Nobody had anything in common and they made it work. They were, to steal a line from Sesame Street, the people that you meet each day.

Perhaps they were trying to tell us something.

We made the first specification incomplete. So keep the technology, the efficiency and everything we’ve gained, but figure out what wavelengths we left out and engineer them back into the world.

Keep the LED.

Fix the light.