Weaving the Threads
What I'm working on metabolizing here.
An awareness has been growing in me for the last year and a half or so. It has been pulling together several different threads I’ve been following for my whole life. These things always felt separate, compartmentalized in my life, like a crazy quilt of different colored squares without any relation other than being part of my own idiosyncratic interests. Now I’m seeing a slightly more coherent pattern emerging but I admit it’s still a bit fuzzy. I’m working to bring this into focus in a more comprehensive way but for now I’ll just lay out the connecting tendrils as I am seeing them.
I started noticing, in myself and others, a renewed need for community — specifically in-person groups and relationships. I recognized the different communities I am a member of, by luck and intention: the Umbraco tech community, my UU church, the parents of our son’s classmates. Mostly I feel deep gratitude for these spaces of belonging and connection but my analytical mind also wanted to figure out why they work well and how they continue to operate even through COVID and the post-COVID lethargy, which I could feel pulling on everyone around me.
In a way, COVID isolation is perhaps what made me more aware of these communities. Not being able to access them in the same way crystallized their value. And I’m not the only one. Post-COVID I began to notice a digital backlash, with more parents I knew drawing a hard line with devices and screen time as well as some small pockets of young adults going full “Luddite” against smartphones. Groups of college students started clubs and protests while high-schoolers began regularly meeting up in the park to sit and talk phone-free. “The Analog Lifestyle” became a thing, with a popular social science book backing it up. This is the natural response — the deeply baked-in human need for socialization asserting itself against a world where Zoom birthday parties had become the norm.
This questioning of the technology that we had all come to rely upon so heavily has spread into a general distrust of the tech titans who benefitted mightily during COVID and the heavier use of their products. While lifting our heads up from our phones, we gained a new awareness that these companies were actively controlling and selling our attention. As we felt the personal costs — physical, mental, emotional — we finally realized these weren’t neutral tools.
Now those same companies (along with new, but similar ones) are telling grandiose stories about how their newest creation, AI (Large Language Models (LLMs) to be specific), will completely change the world. Many of us have rightly become concerned that general humanity isn’t meant to benefit as much as their balance sheets and IPOs in this new world order. After the general mess that widespread social media has made of public discourse and people’s mental health, we are not as trusting of these companies’ intentions — or foresight. The distrust of AI goes even deeper, though, because the heart of the “promise” of AI companies is to remove humans from work, and thus remove a strong sense of purpose and meaning from humans. Bianca expresses what many are feeling right now: “I’d rather have AI wash the dishes so I can write, create, and explore ideas—not write and create for me while I wash the dishes.”
Underlying all of this I have been encountering people all over who are quietly admitting that they are ready for more in their lives. Not more stuff or money but more soul, more meaning, more human connection. A dear friend of mine who has been counseling people of all ages on career and life purpose for nearly 20 years has noticed a new openness to spiritual exploration and more intuitive guidance among her clients. This impulse has been brewing for a long time as well, I think, but now finally people are more open to admitting it out loud. To me these things feel connected and that is the intersection where I am right now.
I’m actively and intentionally following these pathways. I have always been a bit “woo” — intuitive, interested in religion, divination, mythology, and the divine feminine. (Back when I was younger it was called “New Age”.) And I’ve also been a strong linear thinker — organizing, sorting, and problem-solving. I’ve worked in information architecture and programming for decades. These two parts of myself are drawing together like two sides of a zipper. This more unified self is now where I am operating from, and it’s why I am able to see this trend emerging, and hopefully synthesize and articulate it for you as it develops.
What about you? Have you felt this shift in yourself, or in people you know? What parts of this are you seeing, and what am I still missing?