tent camping, brain fog, and the wishful thinking of online community

Tethered | October

You’re reading Tethered Letters, a monthly long-form letter on creative faith and faithful creativity. I also write a biweekly poetry letter called Five Lines, which you can subscribe to here. Oh, and I wrote a book. Everything I write is AI-free. Thanks for reading.

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Hello loved ones,

How are your autumns treating you?

October is waning, and we are at the height of fall color now in northern Indiana. My commute, by virtue of the fact that it takes me along country backroads, is drenched in those colors. It's like swimming through a bright tunnel of oranges, yellows, reds, and purples. Our meadow, on the other hand, is turning seventeen shades of brown, sprinkled with some late yellow and white from asters, goldenrod, and sweet everlasting (which smells exactly like maple syrup). The surrounding fields are all dry rustle and golden stalks, and the nights are crisp and clean.

October was the last month we had to finish up some projects around the place, primarily stripping and staining the front porch, but also tilling and seeding the garden with a cover crop, finishing some mowing, planting a bed of garlic for the spring, etc. I don't know where we would be, as busy as our lives have become, without help for all of these things from my parents (who live with us). They're kind of the best.

October was also vacation, and by vacation I mean our first significant tent-camping trip as a family. We did take a weekend trial-run back in May, which was kind of awful. I made the rookie mistake of leaving the tent tarp outside the footprint of the tent, so the torrential rain we received the second night funneled right underneath us. Because our time was so short, I just felt like most of my time was spent setting up and tearing down, on a pretty hot weekend. We made it work, but it took a long time for me to stop calling our planned October trip "camping" and start calling it "vacation."

But because we had that awful experience, we changed our setup and planned a little better and to my surprise, had an absolutely lovely time. The nights were chilly, but not freezing. The new setup, complete with an overhead tarp connecting our screened tent and our family tent, did wonders for keeping out the rain and providing shade. The easy-prep soups and hot dishes we made tasted all the more satisfying eaten outdoors in autumn.

And speaking of mushrooms, we found three edible types on our hikes! We found four or five giant white puffballs, which are tofu-like, and two patches of old, ragged chicken-of-the-woods which we noted for spring treks. But the real find was a 15-pound cluster of fresh hen-of-the-woods (maitake). These mushrooms go for $18 a pound, which made me feel like I'd just struck gold. They were also, incidentally, delicious.

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I noticed something during our camping trip: I said "yes" to my kids more often. We are by no means indulgent parents or stingy parents — like probably every parent, we're usually just a big jumble of reasonable and unreasonable yes's and no's. When you've got five adorable barbarians lobbing requests at you nonstop, you're likely to say the first thing that comes to your head.

But what I found interesting about my positive responses was my thinking process. It went like this: a kid asks me to do something, I think about all the things I need to accomplish, I realize there aren't any because we're on vacation, and I respond with a slightly surprised "well, yes! I guess I can." I've been in a habit, it seems, of filtering what I will do with my time through a grid of what I need to accomplish first. Sans to-do list, my "yes" comes easier.

Of course we all have many things to accomplish daily, and we should do the work before us. I'm still going to use lists to remember things I need to do. But I think what struck me was how much my brain operates like my phone, with numerous prompts, inboxes, calendars, and notifications swimming around in it at all times. If there's nothing popping up, I'll go looking for something just to make sure I haven't missed it. I've trained myself to do this first, before I respond to people who are right in front of me. I don't have a to-do list for playing cars with Digory or talking about friendship with Nadia. I do have several, with notifications activated, to help me keep up with requests from acquaintances and total strangers.

The forced tasklessness (and techlessness) of vacation actually made me realize how much I walk around in this fog on a daily basis. By the end of the week I had almost stopped squinting and trying to wave away what wasn't there... just in time to walk back into the fog when I got back home.

So I've been wondering in the ensuing weeks, what would it look like to live fogless?

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I feel like I've seen the phrase "online community" over and over in recent days, and I suddenly realized that I have no idea what this means anymore.

It used to mean a combination of social media, online messaging, blogs, and forums that may or may not have been associated with offline connections, and I've been involved in some form of it for almost 20 years now, going back to… gosh, to Xanga. Ah, the halcyon days! I'm not sure many of us knew what we'd unleashed beyond adolescent musings that, to my utter relief, have since vanished into the vortex of the internet. May CJHakker rest in peace and never rise to haunt me.

But in the years following something shifted. What started as a fun experiment became something... not fun anymore. As curation for strangers replaced communication with friends, the whole thing became less Frankenstein’s monster (naive, weird, kind of nice but also a bit dangerous) and more, well, Dr. Frankenstein himself (a narcissistic psychopath).

You know, I think it's partly the combination of words that is starting to bug me. A community, by definition, is a group of people living in the same place; it comes from the idea of land held in common, or shared. It is inextricably linked to particular physical people in a particular physical space, and the internet is non-particular, non-physical, and placeless. So the phrase doesn't make a lot of sense to me anymore. It's like when you read a word so many times that it becomes gibberish — you know that thing? Then yesterday I read about a new and exciting opportunity to be part of an "online liturgical community" and my brain sort of squeezed itself out through my ear.

For as long as I can remember being a part of an interactive online experience, I have assumed that I could nurture a reasonable approximation of community within the digital realm, and that there were benefits to doing so. I thought that the online communities we engage with are facsimiles of real-life communities, if not better (safer) options. And I’ve not been alone. Smarter people than me think so too.

Last year, a professor out of Georgia Tech made the case that online communities should be placed in the category of communities because they have characteristics of our ideal communities – places like small towns, churches, and third spaces. For instance, they run on something called social capital, a shared set of resources that sociologists use to measure the effectiveness of a given network of people. This includes both strong ties (bonds with close friends and family) and weak ties (connections with acquaintances). Strong ties do not increase your social capital due to limited resources, but weak ties do. Online communities are extremely good at fostering weak ties, which means they offer more possibilities to accrue social capital.

This can be very good in certain circumstances, such as when a random person you met in your junior year at college happens to post about a job opportunity that fits you perfectly. These are connections that would not have happened without an online touch point.

Where it gets a little sticky is when she takes aim at offline communities:

"Co-located community can have serious downsides. Hampton and Wellman write that “The nature of community in the nineteenth century, or in nearly any form where people lived in a densely knit network of close ties, had its drawbacks: the density of relations implied a high degree of conformity to similar beliefs, backgrounds, and activities. Rigid hierarchies governed who could communicate with whom” (Hampton and Wellman 2018, 644). Individuality and freedom don’t always thrive when your business is everyone’s business. Escaping the intolerance of old-style communities is a plus."

I find this interesting. Like-minded beliefs, backgrounds, and activities are what bring about connections between people in any context in the first place, and are usually considered a given (if not an upside) for online communities. The difference between the two seems to be that the latter is voluntary, while the former is coerced, perhaps?

Certainly, unthinking conformity in any context can promote either virtue or vice (or both). One could argue that intolerance is hampered in "old-style" communities by the very fact that you can't turn your neighbors off. Your only choice is to learn to live with them. But that would be limiting, wouldn't it? To say that we actually are stuck with what we've been given as placed humans, and maybe we should learn to live with it instead of escaping into something that offers no true challenge to our selves.

Others I’ve read say that online communities offer positives that real communities don't have, like greater honesty and openness among participants (because no one knows you), safety (because you can turn off your phone or computer), and stronger memory (by virtue of online records). I don’t think anyone with any awareness of what’s going on in online spaces these days would agree with either of the first two claims. The memory thing seems logical until you think about how memory actually works, and seems like a plus until you realize how fragile and changeable digital records are. Never mind people in oral communities have exponentially stronger memories than literate communities. Never mind that having records of everything we've ever said and done has been an absolute disaster on so many levels.

Anymore, the attempt to justify online community in all its forms as equal to or better than true embodied community seems to have been based on wishful thinking – and the primary societal illnesses of our time (polarization, radicalization, misinformation, poor mental health, etc.) are the results. The sense of belonging that we got from our online communities was only the cheese in the trap, because what we really got was more loneliness. And even if we somehow manage to feel that we’ve done some good online, we still have to return to where we live and deal with the issues we left behind when we went online – just more poorly equipped to do so then when we left.

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Simply put, we are fundamentally physical beings, not disembodied brains. Our lives happen in a real time and real place. Our online activities, whether we want to admit it or not, are an escape out of the embodied lives we should probably be living, in the embodied communities within which we have been placed.

I also think we get more opportunities to exercise and receive grace within a commonality of place. You may choose to move to a new location, but in general, you get the neighbors, local government officials, geography, industry, and resources that you get in that place.¹ Our control of those things is greatly diminished by comparison to an online equivalent.

And isn't that really what this is about in the end? Coming to terms with our limits as humans is hard. We'd rather avoid it by removing as many limitations as possible. We prefer to think that we can be everywhere, be anyone, remember everything, say anything, know everything, do anything... be God. That possibility is what appealed to me, and it is why I invested years of my actual life in creating an online life: the possibility that I could choose my neighbor instead of love them, adjust my street to my preferences, recode my church to adhere to my standards, curate what I see to include only what I prefer.

I guess I'm just increasingly unsure that what we have called "online community" can be, by any metric of true human or societal value, community. The more we use that combination of words to describe what we encounter when we open our browsers, the more we are devaluing our real communities. The internet as a whole has shaped how we live our lives, and it's not made us better. The draw of it is so perpetual and addictive, because it strikes at a core desire all of us share. We go back to it because we’re lonely, and we feel lost and afraid. Our worlds are out of control, and we desperately need the love and care of a real community. We can’t keep trying to fill that need with something that won’t satisfy it.

You might be wondering why I'm blabbing on about this. What's the big deal? Weren't we talking about fogginess?

I guess I’m just really bothered that even after I’ve left social media, the ongoing effects of this online life mindset are still embedded in me, impacting everything I do.

What I encountered while camping was a tiny window into how a life could be lived if free from that mindset. We didn't bring our computers. Our phones were dead half the time, and the other half they were being used solely for their flashlight function. This created breathing space, clarity, peace, and real presence with the people I love most. The fog lifted for a moment, and I liked the world I saw.

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I found a pithy little piece from Wendell Berry the other day: a 1987 essay in Harpers entitled, "Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer." In it, he outlines how his writing process (which involves his wife's judgment, editing, and typing skills) is good enough for him, and how a computer would not improve it. He then shares his set of nine standards for technological innovation:

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.

8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

To my tech-inebriated mind, this seems like a preposterous standard. Since when do we think this much about the ethics of technology use? Who has time for that? Someone who still doesn't own a computer, that's who.

Community isn't a tool. But for a while now we've been acting as though it can be nurtured through the tool formerly known as the World Wide Web — an expensive, bloated, inefficient, easily-exploited, and real-life-disrupting tool. This tool now mediates or replaces things like conversation, visiting our neighbors, play, sitting in silence together, dialogue, civic engagement, live music, prayer, worship, long walks in nature, intimacy, holding hands, hugs, etc.

We can't destroy the tool as far as I know, although Musk and Zuckerberg are sure giving it their best shot. But maybe we can change our expectations of what it can achieve, and shift our priorities decisively away from it and toward our real communities.

Obviously I’m writing this on a computer and sharing it on Substack, so I don’t subscribe to the viewpoint that computers are bad, or that online communication is irreparably damaged. Certainly I’m a proponent of leaving social media in its current iteration. But as I’m trying to jostle my thinking free of the machine, I really think the first thing is just to drop my phone in the drawer when I get home and engage with my family without it buzzing in my pocket. Maybe I’ll get a dumb phone, maybe I’ll just strip back my current phone to its bare essentials. But I’ve got to silence the tech I use somehow, so I can really be here, now, present with the people I love.

In a later response to some disgruntled readers,² Wendell expands on his 9th point:

"There is such a thing as human relations. And there is such a thing as getting a lot of satisfaction, joy, fun from human relations. And I don’t understand why people are willing to give up on that.... So my little essay about the computer, why I’m not going to buy a computer, was just a part of my strategy to try to keep myself whole as a human being. I don’t want my life to be lived for me by a machine."

Neither do I. And I don't think you do either.

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October Favorites:

• One way we’ve been using all this abundance of mushrooms is with this ridiculously yummy Hungarian Mushroom Soup.

• I revisited Over the Garden Wall this year, and I just love the combo of zany, creepy, and sweet in this little miniseries.

• I’ve been getting back into Bach lately, working on his partitas just for fun. Here’s the current one on the docket, the Partita in G Major by the fantastic András Schiff.

• We finally cracked open Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with the older kids. It is as good as I remember it, and better — and gosh it’s been fun to introduce them to these amazing characters.

• Here’s a couple fall playlists for you. The first is some fresh and classic autumnal vibes:

  And the second is a new list for All Saints. Hope you enjoy!

1. Even if the community you are a part of is a like-minded one (like say, a local church), it is still bound by time and space. The first question we ask when looking for a body of believers to worship with is that of a person bound by time and space: "Which ones are within driving distance?" I think there are good arguments to be made that it's healthier for Christians to go to a local church they may not agree with than it is for them to connect to an "online church" they do.

2. The aftermath of Wendell's article is kind of great, so here's a few more tidbits from it... Respondents took him to task for, among other things, moral hubris and backwards thinking about gender because his wife helps him with typing. He responded with the following:

"I can only conclude that I have scratched the skin of a technological fundamentalism that, like other fundamentalisms, wishes to monopolize a whole society and, therefore, cannot tolerate the smallest difference of opinion....

[To these respondents,] the past was gloomy, drudgery-ridden, servile, meaningless, and slow. The present, thanks only to purchasable products, is meaningful, bright, lively, centralized, and fast. The future, thanks only to more purchasable products, is going to be even better. Thus consumers become salesmen, and the world is made safer for corporations."

To those letters accusing him of not doing his part to be informed about conservation issues via technology, he claps back:

"To the conservation movement, it is only production that causes environmental degradation; the consumption that supports the production is rarely acknowledged to be at fault. The ideal of the run-of-the-mill conservationist is to impose restraints upon production without limiting consumption or burdening the consciences of consumers.... To the extent that we consume, in our present circumstances, we are guilty. To the extent that we guilty consumers are conservationists, we are absurd."