Ten pounds of personality in a five-pound bag
My friend sent me this essay today, and it’s very good.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-crisis-of-gender-relations/
What this has meant for women is a society in which they have options outside the patriarchal bargain. Simply working for a wage is enough to provide the security that once husbands exclusively controlled. Or, to put it more intuitively: the rise of two-income households isn’t a result of economic hardship. It’s a result of economic growth.
Go read it.
A variety of painful circumstances in my life recently have crystallized out a thought, for me: as much as we want a Group to be a cohesive unit, the group is only as strong as the strength of its various dyadic friendships.
When a group that had been constructed around one central Hub Person implodes, the continuance of the group is dependent on whether any of the Spoke People had actually formed individual (“dyadic”) friendships with each other. Without those interconnected friendships, the group would wither away without its Hub. (And maybe that’s why some Hubs feel threatened when they’re no longer the gatekeepers of access to the other friends?)
And when a large enough group (40 or so people) forms, not everyone will be as close to everyone else in that group; so it’s up to the individuals to build (or not build) their friendships with one another. If one person is having a crisis and reaches out, I am finding that sometimes, a larger group is *less* likely to respond. It’s the small six person chats that get things done for each other; or it’s an existing dyadic friendship within the larger circle that recognizes the need and answers it.
Is this the Bystander Effect in action? Are the larger groups prone to feeling too helpless to help? Someone else will do it?
Is this an effect of geography? Some of my Discords are pretty geographically dispersed, and I think that makes it harder (though not impossible) to build those sturdier connections.
It can also be hard to know what/how someone needs help. With closer individual bonds, there’s more of a chance that the person helping will actually help, versus accidentally making things worse. (I know that’s a thing for me as well: I’ve made things worse so often.)
But I just had an absolutely terrible week, and all kinds of people came to my rescue; and I am so grateful. And I witnessed someone else leave a group because they weren’t getting the support they needed, and my heart aches for them; but we were never directly close with each other, either, so I felt too distant (geographically and emotionally) to help. So it goes.
But anyway, my point in all this rambling is: If you are in a large friend group, make sure you aren’t neglecting the individual connections with individual people. In the end, “The Group” is a legal fiction. The people that help you move are the real individual humans that you can bond with, or not, as life takes you.
But try to take care of each other. Yes, The Village is built on unpaid labor. It’s transactional even though it’s not tracked, or shouldn’t be tracked, because Village Support is about having help with specific concrete actions that need doing.
I don’t know. I’m rambling and tired. But just. Look for the helpers; and be the helpers, when you can.
This column by Michelle Singletary really gets at the meat of how to make a simple budget. (It’s basically what I do.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/10/easy-budget-no-app/
This format might not work for everyone – I have friends who swear by You Need A Budget (YNAB), for example – but it works pretty well for me.
I recently discovered this Tumblr meme, which is apparently quite old, and I appreciate it a great deal.
Everyone will not just
If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
I appreciate the pragmatism of this outlook. Because yep, that’s…basically how humans work.
I enjoyed this SMBC comic:
Today, my friend sent me this essay from 2021, and it resonates with me today.
https://thecorners.substack.com/p/if-you-cant-take-in-anymore-theres
Please care for your own hearts. Let the breaker do its job. Don’t wire it shut to force yourself to care about and try to fix every problem you encounter.
Do less.
Don’t do nothing. But you are allowed to do less.
Today on the Internet, I saw a commenter talk about how her relationship with her partner was a “long walk in, long walk out” one: i.e. that they moved slowly in building it up, and if they ever decided to break up, they committed to talking about it first and working on any problems they had.
I really like that attitude/philosophy towards relationships.
This webpage really explains the outcome of web enshittification better than plain words can.
Today, my friend mentioned the phrase “Knife Logic” to me, and when I asked her what she meant, she had this to say:
The logic that there’s always a knife at your back, that there’s always a scarcity you’re outrunning, and always someone who can replace you if you falter, and so if you choose to help another, you’re slowing yourself down by carrying them. That’s not to say that you should never help anyone, but it always has costs, about which one must be clear-minded. The brutal logic of scarcity and survival is always the deepest underpinning. Similarly, because everyone else is operating under those constraints, you should never expect others to slow their own flight from scarcity by helping you or extending you grace.
That’s…pretty harsh, but it also pretty much encapsulates my own attitude towards other people. I do help people, but I’m always very limited in how I do it, because I have a scarcity mindset about resources — probably due to my grandmother’s influence in my upbringing. She moved to America in 1930, and lived through the Great Depression. My grandfather literally starved as a teenager before cheating his way into the CCC’s (by bloating to make weight, per family lore). Scarcity is one of the Gods of the Copybook Headings that I don’t think I will ever be able to ignore.
Would I like to live in a post-scarcity society? Yes, I would. But technologically, we are not there yet. And until we are, this fact of scarcity will always be the fundamental underpinning of anything we do.
Years ago, I learned this phrase from… Captain Awkward, I believe?
I use this phrase pretty frequently, mostly to acknowledge my own irrational reactions to people I don’t particularly enjoy.
Emilybook 