Recently, I went on a four-day trip to Bangalore. So vast a universe was contained in those four days. I went with my close friends, people who have partially colonised various aspects of my being through their strong, distinct energies, and spending a large part of life with them for the most part of the last six months has been a powerful experience - they're all people who have such a natural tendency towards community, towards socializing, it seems to be as easy as breathing to them, so bereft of any of the horrible neuroses that have come to so naturally rest in the social scripts of our generation, of performances and judgement. They're all people's people, you could say.
I read somewhere about Blue Zones (this is something I've talked to them about a hundred times), which are geographic zones where life spans are longer than usual, and despite the excessive amount of smoking and poor diets in some of these zones, people go on to live long lives because of an existence that is structured around community - work is built around community, leisure is built around community, real community that are rooted in flesh and bone and pain and agony and misery but also laughter and tears. I don't find it hard to believe. It has been an extraordinary existence, a vivid, vibrant episode in my life. We were talking on the balcony yesterday, and someone openly said that most people don't have what we have - they're just lonely, with no support systems, and are confined to a life of domestic procedure - I live in a country where the culture is not conducive to building organic social infrastructures, and really has it's purpose as generating silent, insular, non-problematic families where investments in sons are returned in the form of good grades and timely paychecks and the girls, good grades and good grooms, and these are respectively the identities that young adults are allowed to inhabit, of hard workers and obedient girls, an identity so hollow and soul-draining that the linking of actors to identity has reduced the youth to states of mass hysteria and community is not a continuous, recurring thing but a period competition where one gets to showcase the returns on these investments, and purpose is gained through religion, rearing your family and performing your competence at rearing your family.
I read a book by Christopher Piccolini, a reformed Neonazi on his accounts of deradicalizing with Neonazis and other alt-right radicals, people who are representative of the poor, deteriorating social health in a culture, and when they have their psychologies dissected, spill open to reveal the entire underlying fundamental DNA of this culture and society. Piccolini finds a common syntax of IDENTITY, PURPOSE, AND COMMUNITY that guide human behaviour in a society, and are the basic unit of any social infrastructure, and uses various examples to show that when the drive for these three things are exploited and pointed towards malicious objectives, normal people can become killers.
It is hard to condemn all of the enablers of this insular culture in my country as sometimes, it is not the result of cruelty as much as it is the simple reality that my country is a poor country, and some social structures naturally form around the desire to survive and feed yourself and your children, to take the safest possible route to a safest possible life without earning the ire of anyone around you. These are social contracts that have emerged naturally to ensure continued existence in a poor country where all time is seen as money and most leisures are seen as cultural imports that are practised by the upper classes - this is not some empathetic endorsement of casteists however, who are essentially terrorists with a horribly misplaced sense of ICP, behaviour that requires you to shed any sense of basic human decency. In fact, I will talk out of my ass and say that if you go to any toxic, repressive environment, one can find a maligned sense of ICP that is contingent entirely on external factors like performativity rather than internal wealth.
Take the internet for example. The internet has become a closed loop - in urban areas, it has become an approximation of the body itself, like a second skin wrapping around you:
1) through quick commerce apps, food, water, other non-essentials are delivered so instantly that to the mind, it genuinely does feel like you just pressed a button and a coke can appeared in your hand, vanishing the relationship of physical movement to the satiation of physical needs, living in an instantly accessible infinity that transcends geography, time, space, approximating the limbs that would take you to such a store
2) through pornography, the brain is so viciously rewired that one eventually feels stranger a participant and not a stranger, mutating the human sexual drive - sexual pleasure becomes instantly accessible.
3) pleasure, something that arrives at the terminal end of tasks that demand mental or physical labour, has been diluted down to it's atomic form in the shape of short-form content, served up in shotglass after shotglass. the two fleeting shortcuts to joy - the very titillating nature of a joke is exploited (set-up, a period of tension where one waits for the jolt to come, and then the jolt comes) to shock the user into life over and over again, OR, the mindless euphoria of anger is utilized by serving up clips that display the sins of the Other. the algorithm being the algorithm, optimizes for these shortest paths to user addiction, and the consequence is a generation that is eternally embroiled in a culture war while those who run these media channels get richer and richer. anyway, this negates that human desire to utilize the brain and body for achieving contentment, forming a second skin that instead puts one instantly into contact with bottled joy the moment their mind reaches for it.
4) work, the source of money that helps keeps the lights on and the bills paid, has been migrated entirely online for certain classes of people
5) the aching desire for selfhood and identity, something that was naturally emergent through action and life experiences, is now simply a collection of the right purchases, a curation of the right aesthetic, the right caption with the right post, hijacking the right social movement. the algorithm has again optimized to serve up political identities that are INTERTWINED in a hate relationship with another political identity - neither cannot exist without the other, because their very purpose is the constant degradation of the other, hence creating an infinite loop that generates a never-ending stream of hateful content. these identities, not just necessarily political, but also cosmetic - goth girl, emo boy - have to be as hollow and surface-level as possible, in order to allow immediate attachment, frictionless internalization and integration, and also instant classification of people into the Others, and into the Self. A vanishing of nuance. These hollow, two-dimensional identities are hence not formed or solidified through meaningful life choices or experiences or adversity, but through the transmission of certain atomic signals that scream you are not the Other, and through battle with the Other. The reduction of the internal consciousness to a mindless vector.
6) community is simply an agglomeration of this. an endless algorithmically curated chain of fissile reactions. in countries like mine, where Community is frowned upon as it is a threat to integrity of the family unit, and Community-based activities are expensive, tech channels community through it's gray interfaces, forcing the lonely online, and forcing the offline to be lonely.
7) the human desire to make art, to write, to express, is filtered through this second skin into a titillating game of who can frame the most impactful sentences within a prescribed character limit - the process of ideating, curating, constructing, then sending it out into the world, and then seeing how the Community reacts to it. Here, again, there is a vanishing of nuance, of granularity. Of course, the best way of winning this game is to make this sentence as outrageous, as eye-catching as possible, a leaning towards polar behaviour over level-headed discussion. people who spend a major amount of their time communicating on these platforms eventually begin to have their thought patterns altered by this, so that they start framing their thoughts in terms of tweets or stories or posts. before, the terrifying beauty of life could find no other dam to burst through but through sprawling, powerful art - now, real life can be instantly alchemized, translated into these sad thought patterns of tweets/stories/posts, a seamless stream of human perception STRAIGHT to the internet, so that it is almost like our generation perceives the world through the third eye of the internet, where reality dissolves into the languages of social media.
8) perhaps i am being hyperbolic here but we have, very, very recently, reached the surreal point in reality where we can outsource a major part of our thinking to the internet via ai. not even our brain has been spared.
Hence, it forms a closed loop that will deliver a hollow but titillating form of everything the body could ever want and needs to physically move itself for, acting as a second skin that allows a human to access a certain plane of infinity, collapsing biology and geography.
The second skin is characterized by an objective of collapsing the path to any reward into a single click, into a single impulsive thought. Life is hence, experienced in impulses.
The solution to this, as I've experienced in the last few months, seems to be Community. There is something about a shared existence with other humans that reminds you intensely of your own humanity - it is like watching other wonderful iterations of your own core essence, watching the beauty the world is capable of conjuring. Inside jokes, shared sorrows, doing the mundane together, harmless jabs and moving observations and personal stories - all these little things in the grammar of friendship and camaraderie, are inexplicably beautiful. It reminds you of what a joy it is to inhabit your own flesh. It will make you feel like we were all born to laugh and cry together in the shade of a tree. It is allowing yourself to unfold till it feels like your energy, your thoughts, your presence, have touched every person in the room even if you haven't said a word. Inexpressibly beautiful.
But I remember my friend V also saying that we would never have gotten to experience all this if we did not have an empty house in which to do all our fooling around, to relax and feel comfortable and laugh till our guts hurt, knock back three beers, blast songs, a social space that was available to us all times of the day, so we could drop in anytime we want. While looking for a quote for this entry (which I was not able to find - something about capitalism exhausting community until it would monetize community itself and supply it to the lonely), I coincidentally stumbled upon the concept of Third Spaces, social spaces that are being touted as the solution to this generational epidemic of alienation and loneliness. Seeing from how I was compelled to write this entry on community as a antidote to technocapitalist rot without ever having heard of this concept of third spaces, I would be inclined to agree.