Okay, call it a come back
Photo by Mathias Reding.
Years ago, well before amplified sound. Well before vocal coaching. Well before cough drops. And hot tea with lemon. Way back in the early days, when we needed a group to reconvene, one of us would holler. Loud. Starting from the base of the belly, sound rising to the back of our throats.
Come on back.
See, the thing is, people in breakout groups don't like to be reconvened. They were just getting to the good bit. The part of the anecdote that breaks the whole thing open. The near-strangers they were paired with were nodding along. And then, at the worst possible time, one of us would yell.
Come on back.
The price of yelling to reconvene a group is high. You lose your voice, for one. It's impossible to be loud enough to cut through dozens of small groups talking. Which is why activists and summer camps solve this a different way.
If you can hear me, clap once. Said in a whisper. And then, slowly, gaining in speed and volume, until the entire room is back at attention.
Make your way back
We have a famously fraught relationship with picking a word-of-the-year. But if we are allowed to announce one in August, this year's is "come back." And yes, that's two words. We know.
These words first showed up a few months ago, at the tail-end of a massive project. In order to make space for that work, a lot of other things ended up on hold. Mostly social things. As introverted folks, it was easy to drop anything that required a full social battery.
The argument to skimp on social connection is as compelling the hundredth time around as it is the first time. You don't have the time. You don't have the energy. And your couch is like, right there. Look how comfy it is. And quiet. But the longer you wait to re-engage, the more you go from "temporarily focused on a project" to "Salinger-esque recluse."
Doing the other thing. Choosing to reinvest and restitch social and community ties is harder. So when Priya tucked a link to Join or Die screenings in her most recent newsletter, it found us at precisely the right moment. The big, enormous project was building out our new HQ and a venue to host our programs. Just as the Join or Die team was looking for spaces and folks who might want to host a community screening.
It's not that we were unaware of Robert Putnam's work or the impact of Bowling Alone or growing social isolation. It's just that a profound love of your living room can push decades of research on social capital to the wayside.
You can tell us that it's just us, but we don't think it is. We don't think it's just us and our friends. We don't think it's just the introverts, or just the COVID-sensitive folks, or just the tech people. We suspect there's rather a lot of us in this spot. And while we don't need you to join every club. And we don't need you to abandon your living room altogether. If you've been prioritizing a bunch of other things over social connection, now is a great time to interrogate those choices. At home, sure. But also in that other place most of us spend a full third of our waking hours. Because whether you're feeling it or not, we're pretty sure the people you work with are.
What's this about work?
Work is tricky because there's an illusion of connection and collaboration. You talk to each other (at least digitally). You're in meetings constantly. You swap memes, you send happy birthdays. There are people in your personal life you haven't seen or spoken to in years, but every day you get pictures of Jay in Finance's dog Finnegan, and you put a little 🥩 emoji on each of them. That's connection? Isn't it?
And maybe that's enough, for work. There's certainly plenty of support out there for the idea that work doesn't have to be a social hub, or a source of connection and meaning. Get your bag. Keep it demure. This generation, after all, does not dream of labor. Yeah, maybe.
We don't buy it. Like, by all means have clear boundaries about work. Don't let anyone use words like "passion" or "we're like a family" as a way to pressure and exploit you into something unsustainable. Work has an inherent dignity but not all workplaces do, and not every job is equally worthy of your time. There are toxic jobs and toxic colleagues and no one needs to invest in reconnecting with either.
But great work also exists. Work that stretches you, and makes you feel great, work that is fun, and whose impact you can see on the world, is possible. Outside of the TikTok punchlines about it, you've probably experienced that feeling at least a couple times. And if you have then you know: great work happens in collaboration and connection and interplay with other people.
The fraying of human connections is doubly hard at work. It's hard because it can feel so fucking lonely to sit in a day of zoom rooms. And it's hard because it can feel so fucking empty to do work without that connection to the people you're working with.
So yeah. We think there's some work to do here, too.
I'm not really a joiner
The hardest part is that our defaults have changed. An object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest and a team that joins with their cameras off tends to keep their cameras off and a hybrid team that's never in-office on the same days tends to feel pretty disconnected and disengaged. In the trailer for Join or Die, they drop the line that cuts to the heart of it. I'm not really a joiner.
We hosted a Pulse last week about remote work, and we asked people about the best remote experience they'd ever had. No restrictions on content, just whatever came to mind as meaningful. We weren't sure what we'd get, but three patterns showed up loud and clear.
Most people named an experience related to their workplace, even if it was a social event
Most people talked about the preparation and design that went into it
Most people described something from several years ago
It's been several years since the whole world had to get creative in a hurry about how to gather under weird and different constraints. It was a terrifying and impossible time, but for those with the privilege to be able to work from home safely, it was also a very generative one. We did cooking classes, and pottery, and breakfast/coffee/cocktail chats, and résumé reviews, and sound baths, and trivia. We knew we needed connection, and we exerted unreasonable effort to find a way to sustain it.
And now we're...here. Here where some people are fully back in it. And where others would love to come back but aren't sure how to do it safely. Or whether they can do it at all. Here where the XOXO festival is kicking off with mandatory indoor masking and simulcast outdoor venues and a whole-ass CC-licensed COVID policy. Here where the Creative Mornings folks are still hosting dozens of online FieldTrips a month. None of it is perfect, none of it is easy, none of it will be trivial for you to photocopy onto your workplace, or your neighbourhood, or your family. But it's also not gonna come back on its own. There is some design work to do if we want to build new connections, and rebuild the ones we miss. Some unreasonable effort.
We are not yet at the point where the entire room is back at attention. But the whisper is gaining in speed and in volume. It is time to stitch the small and gigantic fissures. Time to do the dishes. To join or die.
If you can hear us, clap once.
— Melissa & Johnathan