A chat with Mpisi
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
Today my YouTube feed gave me this…
It is a chat between Mike Corey, a YouTuber whose goal it is to show people that travel is nothing to be afraid of, and Mpisi, the medicine man and tribal elder of the Ndebele tribe in Zimbabwe in Southern Africa, and it gave me some food for thought.
Basically Mpisi tells that city life is full of chemicals, in the food, in the clothing, and in the environment. He thinks people are far happier in villages, where people are hospitable and friendly. He finds that in the city everybody is alone, just one, and that there is no hospitality. He thinks money should be invested in goats or chickens, so that it can grow.
We have a lot of comforts in modern life — hot and cold running water, showers, toilets, electric light, refrigerators, washing machines — all sorts of labour saving devices, so that we can spend our days surfing the internet and watching wise YouTube videos. These are things you wouldn’t have living the tribal life in Southern Zimbabwe.
Yet I think Mpisi is not far wrong when he says the problems of modern life have to do with connectedness, with being open to our fellow humans and to the animals.
Comments
Evolution "designed" humans to live in small bands of hunter/gatherers. We stepped out of that world when we started agriculture and animal husbandry. Ever since so many of our problems are problems created by our solutions to previous problems. Horses help us carry more and be more productive allowing us to better feed ourselves > horse manure piles up in cities at city block scales > automobiles solve that problem > now we have unwalkable cities and CO2 pollution.
I'm happy moving forward and keeping with the "solve the next problem" type of mentality. Off the top of my head (so it may be off) in the 1900s something like 1/3 of children died before 5, now its around 1%. A more productive, specialized world allows some of us to give art, writing, spirituality, science to the rest of the world rather than 95% of us focusing on food, shelter and security.
The Harvard study of adult development has been going on for over 80 years and they've found that the best predictor of well being and longevity is the quality of our relationships. For all the talk of tracking our biometrics or getting chemicals out of food this is a major factor that hasn't gotten enough attention. People are starting to talk more about it lately. It gets framed more as a loneliness epidemic.
This is 6 years old, and its only getting worse.
It’s a good video, I like Kurzgesagt a lot. It does strike me though, loneliness is a social problem relating to where and how we live. It is not so easy to solve.
In a village, everyone draws water from the well. So the well becomes a central meeting point, where interaction happens. When you supply all the homes with running water, that interaction vanishes. It’s a piece of the social life of the village that disappears.
So if our modern way of living has removed a lot of social interactions, how do we go about putting those back into our lives? Here in the Netherlands there is a trend towards putting “neighbourhood homes” into suburbs. These are a kind of community centres, but the question then becomes, how do you motivate people to go there? Subsidised cups of coffee, pool tables, painting lessons, and so on only go so far.
You see a lot of older people in community centres here, those who have retired. They have time, while young people are in education and the middle aged are at work.
Its a good question, and I think the right question. I don't have a good answer, I'm kind of pessimistic on the whole thing, I think emotional support robots will become more commonplace and allow people to continue the trend of an individually cultivated social and information sphere.
I can spit out a collection of thoughts.
I do like the idea of communal living arrangements with shared common areas and private living areas. I lived in an apartment complex with my brother for a couple years when I was younger that had an active community center. I tried getting involved, went to the weekly movie night and joined a volleyball and basketball league. I had fun with the activities but found I didn't really fit in with the sort of people who did that sort of thing. I'd classify them as extroverts who liked to party. There were 100s of people who lived in the apartments, but maybe a few dozen who showed up to the events. I think in less developed societies there is a greater necessity to be involved with survival and group cohesion, like you said with the example of the well, in this situation it was just for fun.
I also look at my sister's life, she lives on a lake with a lot of her childhood friends and family. Those who don't live there come to visit and during the summer they spend a good portion of most weekends hanging out and socializing. And she makes new friends with others in her new neighborhood. Its mostly all extroverted partyers though. There's an idea that with people moving to cities the relative value of extroversion went up. You have to meet new people and make a positive impression. I have small town relatives with similar situations, their communities with friends and family are much more tight knit. They're in farming communities that are still economically viable so people have stuck around. They attend church, join the volunteer fire dept., go to street dances, get to know their neighbors through everyday business and work interactions, etc. But they grew up with a lot of these people and introverted people are sort of included by default. As an introvert I'm able to go on vacations and do fun things because I have family who do those things and I get invited. If I were on my own I'd have a harder time, its a big part of the reason I started with D&D again, its nice to interact with people over a shared interest.
In many ways the ability for people to move around and find like minded people through the internet to associate with has been a positive, especially for smaller, more marginalized people like LGBT. At the same time it has come at a cost, in much the same way as large anonymized and atomized cities, people stop associating with the community around them, or those who aren't exactly like them. I like the analogy of a cultural tower of Babel, differing cultural groups speak different languages in many ways. Maybe worse, the words they use are often the same but the meaning or value behind them are different leading to all kinds of misunderstandings and conflict.
The best I can think for a solution is some sort of cultural norm around socialization and relationships along the line of the value of diet and exercise. Trying to figure out a structural remedy I'm at a loss. I think the notion of allowing more experiments in living arrangements is maybe the way? Allow people to try things and if there are ideas that work well for people, more will slowly adopt it.
The introvert vs extrovert situation very much chimes with me. I’m quite an introverted person, but for a while I was a volunteer member of a mental health team in the Dutch town where I lived. The idea was to provide support for people who were just under the radar, not ill enough to need professional help but not doing so great on their own. I’d regularly meet a client in the local community centre, for coffee and cake and a talk.
This was very much concerned with loneliness and people who didn’t get out much. One was an avid player of the MMO game Second Life, one was an ex-truck driver who was now retired, one was a recovering mental health client trying to do mail delivery for the postal service. They were all definitely introverted people.
I wasn’t an active part of the team for very long, I’m not really good enough at small talk to be comfortable doing that work. But it showed me that even very introverted people will show up if you make an appointment for coffee and cake with them. However, lacking extroverted family members in the immediate surroundings who drag you along, it’s hard to find projects like the one I was engaged with.
You could say these things are a public health initiative, because loneliness is as much a predictor for an early death as obesity or smoking.
Another thought.
There is an important difference between being lonely and being alone. Its not that out of place for me to go a week without talking to another human and I've probably gone a month or more on occasion. It doesn't bother me, I don't even really notice, I don't feel sad about it, or wish it otherwise. When I do have the occasion to then talk with someone I don't feel awkward or shy about it, though I'm not very good at getting personal and connecting. I think I put out some sort of quiet, thoughtful vibe that makes some people feel awkward towards me. I don't know, its something different that seems to make ongoing relationships weird with many people.
At the same time I was talking to a longtime client of mine, a Vietnam vet with still bad PTSD about the difference between lonely and alone. He brought up a good point that was a difference between him and me. I had family that I knew would be there for support if I needed it. Or to just hang out with occasionally. He was much more on his own and that makes a big difference.
I know the quiet, thoughtful vibe, although I often feel an unheimlich feeling when I’m in those spaces (meaning unhomed, discomfited in German). I personally was quite serious when I was younger, trying to be dependable, while later on in life I learned to clown a bit more and I learned bonhomie, great-heartedness. These are things I now draw upon in my contacts with others.
But these things help in making superficial contacts. What I’ve found to be useful in making deeper connections is shared interests and shared emotional experiences. Some things are common to all humans of a certain age, and you can draw on those to connect to people. Like I was talking to a friend of my own age about the children’s television programmes we remember from the seventies and eighties, for example.
My father’s approach was giving. He was a loyal friend, and would often visit friends or relatives of friends who were dying, bringing them his energy and friendliness. His close friends were all there at his cremation, he was valued and appreciated.
These may be relevant to the thread.
Well… the other thing is, YouTube is in a continual search for the most alarming messages, because those generate clicks. I’m not so much in favour of that, and I rather think that life will just find a way to carry on.