There is a certain mode of thought that considers a good sort of life to be a stable one, where you own your own piece of land, cultivate your own garden, and live as best you can off of what you yourself can produce. You will have a front porch with rocking chairs for conversations on warm summer nights, a fireplace or wood stove for conversations on cold winter nights, and your nearest neighbor will be a pipe’s-smoke walk away. This idyllic view of community with a sense of place has a lot of attraction for me, and I’ll probably attempt it myself in a few decades when (if) I’m finally ready to settle down. It strikes me as a good way to retire, after I’ve finished raising whatever children I may have, and am ready to sit down and simply write for whatever days still remain to me.
Fairly often, proponents of the front-porch-and-pipe-smoke mentality go one step further in their reasoning, and say that such a life is the only way to experience true community. Such arguments are generally critical of the “modern lifestyle:” namely, the suburban, technological, fragmented state of affairs common to most of the American middle class. I agree with many of these criticisms: I’ve seen cities, farms, and wild mountains that I’ve loved, but have never yet seen a cookie-cutter two story I wouldn’t have liked better razed. The same goes for the stock attacks against consumerism and materialism (see the works of the philosopher Tyler Durden). The internet, of course, comes under regular heavy fire, ranging from the quaint complaints of the uninformed elderly to well-thought out pieces like David Carver’s recent article over on Drunken Koudou (nostalgia about the internet–come on, David, I’m too young to feel old).
What’s generally lacking is any kind of alternative to the land-owning, gold-hoarding, gun-toting cabin owner sort of existence. Here, then, is my two cents: don’t spend them all in one place.
To find my kind of alternative, go back to the good old days. No, not the good old days where everybody lived in a cabin in the woods. I mean back to the days when cabins were unheard of, and we humans ranged the earth with everything we owned on our backs and horses, and the natural world was still a dangerous place. In other words, when our sense of community and place was not defined by a physical location (cabin or otherwise), but rather by those we were with and the contributions we ourselves could make to the group. It’s hard to make a mansion from a tent, so one’s “place” in a community was defined by merit: the greatest hunter, the wisest woman, and the oldest members of the tribe, in a time when old age was only possible with wisdom, talent, and strength.
Those were difficult and violent times: don’t mistake me for some kind of noble savage idealist. Unless you’re reading this from a yurt in Mongolia (if so, congratulations on your technological determination) you probably weren’t raised in a nomadic society, and won’t ever really be able to immerse yourself into any of the traditional ones. Don’t lose hope. Societies always change, and in this world cultures of every kind are constantly evaporating and condensing. So where are the nomad communities of the modern age? To answer that, one only has to spend the night in a hostel in New York or London, or look for the faces that stand out on a crowded bus in the Balkans.
That’s right. It is possible to find real community even in an internet-addled age, and of the oldest sort: the kind built of a common state of transience. In my first real foray into the traveling life (the summer of 09) I made friendships that, while brief, were and are still stronger than those I had with many of the people I saw every day for three years in college. In some ways, those friendships were made easier because the sort of people who participate in long-term travel (not week-long-vacation tourists or spring break kids, in other words) generally share many of my interests and are fairly laid-back. You have to be to really travel–depend too much on hard schedules and set itineraries and you’ll eventually just lose it when that Turkish bus driver hands you off to yet another non-English-speaking friend/relative to get you where you’re going.
Really, though, I think the strength of these communities–brief and transient as they tend to be–lies in their shared experiences. In eastern Europe, for instance, I traveled for about a week with a couple of blokes called Alex and Kiril, and experienced stronger friendship in that week than I have with many I’ve known for years. There is the storytelling side of such experiences, of course–the broken train in Bosnia, the double night border crossings on the trip from Sarajevo to Belgrade, and camping out in the woods next to Pula, Croatia, are stories we will no doubt all continue to tell, and which we will reminisce about should we ever meet again.
Another part of that strength comes from the tests shared experiences bring. You can know someone at work or next door for years, and never really know them, simply because you’ve never seen them react to real difficulty, and never had to rely on them. The shared experiences of travel, especially when you leave the beaten bath, tend to be challenging and difficult. You have to rely on others, and to be reliable yourself. It becomes apparent very quickly when someone can’t handle the stress of travel, or can’t contribute to the group, and I suppose that happens often enough. But when it doesn’t–when you experience and overcome difficult challenges standing side by side with fellow travelers and come out still standing–that’s when real friendships are made, and real community is formed.
So, I say, don’t worry so much about what the internet is doing to your social life. Don’t worry so much about owning a house rather than renting. Don’t worry so much about trying to conform to the standards of your geographical “community.” If you want to experience what real community is, do something hard, and do it somewhere outside of your comfort zone. That could be anything–hiking in the mountains, building a house, learning how to fight. If you’d like my personal recommendation, I’d suggest buying a one way ticket to anywhere, walking out on the road, and sticking a thumb out. The rest will come in time.
