A dreamer's journey

[DonkeyHaute]

Wow! The costs really add up. Thanks for sharing the link!

[blink2ce]

I read a paper from Nate Hagens. Here is the link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 0919310067
It is an interesting read, but nothing new for someone who has already read a lot about peak oil. This paper was written in 2019.

[blink2ce]

On Community, and its Absence.

There are different kinds of loneliness. Loneliness can range from the despair/agony of a child being abused and discarded by his parents, all the way to the somber pondering of the great beyond in your old age as your last childhood friend dies.

There is something that creates loneliness in me, and it has been persistent throughout my whole life as far back as I can remember.

It my lack of membership in a community. Actual, real community.

It has always been patently obvious to me that a real community satisfies the following requirements:
- Members live near each other in a specific geographic area.
- Members are densely networked. Aka, Many people know many people in the community.
- Members know each other informally.
- Members share social bonds — They care about each other.
- Members help each other freely and willingly, knowing that their help will be rewarded recriprocally. (I will help Joe paint his deck and he will help my nephew get a job.)
- Members especially help each other in such a way that the whole community becomes more economically resilient. (Create solutions inside the community instead of always seeking the answer outside)
- Members share meals together often
- If a member is in the community, his/her whole family is also in the community.
- Members share the same (or similar) values about what a good life is supposed to look like, and how a Good Person should conduct themselves.
- People who do harm to members of the community on a consistent basis are identified and ostracized.

Community, as defined above, doesn’t really seem to exist in the USA anymore.

It irks me when people use the word “community” for things that are not real communities. News pundits will talk about “the country’s Jewish/Black/Francophone Community” as if those are real things. The pundits are just referring to a group of people who share cultural values, share a global religion or just share physical traits.

Even worse is when software companies will call their online helpdesk/FAQ forum a “community”. My god, if this is our idea of a community, how far have we fallen?

I have tried to talk to people in my life about my idea of what community is. People tell me “go pick up a hobby and make a new friend!” "Get a wife/girlfriend!" Sure, those things are good, but that’s not the same thing at all.

I really don’t know the history of community throughout America’s history and throughout civilizational history — All I know for sure is that it seems to have disappeared.

While the causes of the breakdown of community are quite interesting, and I will list them here — Consumerism, suburbia, Facebookstagramtok, Television, automobiles, wealth inequality, decline of religion, monopolization/centralization of power, Globocorp, excessive bureacracy, etc …

I would like to explore what I will do personally to create/recreate some community for myself. I don’t know how I’ll do it, and I don’t know when I’ll start. But I doubt I’ll keep going the rest of my life without trying a few things.

I don't know how hard it would be for me to achieve success (Maybe it's easy?)

This particular subtype of loneliness has a specific feeling in me. I feel like I'm drifting, a bit disoriented, a little blurry, empty in the chest. I feel let down, a bit useless.

I don’t post on my journal often but when I do I expect I will be speaking about this more.

I guess for now this post is more of a “problem statement” than a chronicle of my activities.

If you have thoughts about the status of community in your country, or if you have experience joining/creating a healthy community, I would be curious to hear your thoughts.

[jacob]

Community, as defined above, doesn’t really seem to exist in the USA anymore.

I think it does but perhaps you need to look lower at the socioeconomic scale than you might have been? White collar professionals in particular have substituted community for "the free market/at-will employment", but those with low or erratic sources of income still habitually rely on their neighbors and therefore tend to exhibit the behaviors you listed. Note that this is sometimes or perhaps more accurately often not because they want to but because they need to.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Some other things to consider on community:

1. It can also depend on where you live. I live in a very transient city for example and it makes it harder to get to know people because other people don't always want to put in the effort of building up social bonds beyond hobby friendship because they anticipate moving again soon. On the flip side, when I have been to small towns, people often show more interest in getting to know me because everyone knows everyone. Note that everyone knowing everyone is not always a positive thing because gossip and reputations are way bigger concerns in actual communities opposed to transient cities where everyone traded community for the free market.

2. Sometimes it's easier to just join an existing community instead of creating one from scratch. I notice in Longmont for example, the FI community is actually a community because everyone went there with the explicit goal of joining a community. So you may have better luck trying something that already exists than starting from scratch. I find that a lot of people at hobby events/etc often aren't interested in connecting beyond having someone to do the hobby with, and that's just sometimes the nature of the beast.

3. If you want to bootstrap it, it involves talking to hundreds of people, getting their phone numbers, setting up coffee dates, hosting parties, and basically making it a full time job. Sometimes I suspect half the reason this is a problem these days is that this is a lot of unrecognized labor upper middle class people gave up in favor of trading labor to work where you make more money.

[7Wannabe5]

I've been reading a lot about the loneliness epidemic, and I think there is something very generational and gendered about it. There was an article in NYT yesterday which affirmed my own sense (integrating data studies from recent book "Generations") that Gen X women (currently age 45 to 60) aren't experiencing this epidemic of loneliness and, in fact, it almost feels like there is a critical shortage of women who are old enough to be a grandmother, experienced enough to have accumulated a variety of marketable or practical skills, yet still young enough to go on a date. The author described my generation of women as The Perennials, because we keep blooming again, and I've had the exact same thought myself. Women my age are too much in demand from all quarters of society to feel lonely.

So, the question is how can humans who are feeling lonely better take on some of the social-task overflow caused by the relative numerical shortage of Gen X women? I don't know the answer to the question, but as a first attempt for a younger man, I would suggest that the huge difference in economic situations of the current batch of kids who are Gen Alpha (age 12 and under) is a problem that could definitely benefit from young successful men taking on volunteer coaching and mentoring type positions. For example, there was a young man who volunteered to take a group of rowdy kindergarteners out on the playground to do sports twice a week at one of the schools where I taught, and he was beloved by all. My millennial daughter and her husband are strongly engaged in Level Green community, and I absolutely would have set that young man up with one of my daughter's single friends if I had the opportunity, even if he wasn't a perfect fit for the music, arts, re-enactment, and nerdy game type activities her social community seems to constantly engage in.

OTOH, volunteering to walk outdoors with the elderly at a Senior Center associated with a large church could lead to similar opportunities, but more centered around Neo-Trad activities.

In conclusion, if you want community, your choices are basically Post-Modern Progressive or Neo-Trad, pick one, because Modern inherently does not offer community. In order to gain entry to either of these communities, your best bet would be to figure out some way to take a task/package off the load currently being carried by a Gen-X female. Seriously, the situation is so bad, there are Gen-X women who would even be grateful if you would just take one of their grouchy Boomer male partners fishing for the weekend.

[blink2ce]

Thank you guys for your replies.

@7wannabe5, that is a very cool idea that community can only exist at Level Blue (Neo-Trad) or Green (Postmodern), and not at Orange (Modern).

I have a funny anecdote. When I was 18, I told my freshman college roommate that it isn’t possible to claim that any song is good or bad. Because even if you think a song is really bad, someone else out there might love it. He laughed at me and told me I’m a raging liberal. At the time I was surprised at his reaction.

I look back now at that conversation and I think it’s amusing that I could have thought such a thing about music. While music is of course subjective, it is not completely subjective. There are commonly understood characteristics of good music vs bad, such as emotionality, musicality, originality, catchiness, thoughtfulness, etc. It is definitely justifiable to call some music bad other music good, even if some people don’t agree with all of the choices.

All this to say, I suppose that I was in deep Level Green in college. Now I see things more at Level Yellow. But I live my life at Level Orange.

It is quite interesting to me that GenX women have so much going on socially. It makes a lot of sense. But it’s not something I would have considered on my own.

Most of my life I have spent around Level Orange and Level Green thinkers. I agree that Orange is totally empty. Everyone in Orange just works hard at their job, gets promotions, buys stuff, has 1 child or a dog, and stays home. Level Orange people are anxious because they are never as financially successful as they should be “if they just could apply their smarts a little harder!”

Level Green people also appear anxious to me but in a different way. Level Green people are anxious because there are too many young/old/helpless people in the world who need to be heard, safe and included. There’s not enough time for us to help them all! And there are also too many bad, intolerant people in the world who might hurt someone.

I don’t think Level Blue people are usually as anxious as Orange or Green. They can be more settled in their clearly defined viewpoints about their world and clear moral code.

I will consider opportunities to help out a GenX woman. I like that idea.

[blink2ce]

I have decided that it is time to share more on this forum.

I am in my early 30s. Born in a tract development suburb in the USA. Both of my parents are pedophiles and they regularly raped me and my siblings. I have been in trauma-specific therapy since 2018. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder).

Somehow, I have a job. I have stayed employed most of the time since graduating from university. I’m not dead, not broke, not in prison, not on drugs, or on disability. I maintain the outward functions of a normal person.

Due to the memories being repressed, I had no idea that my parents were the problem until I was about 26. I knew my life was awful and I didn’t know why. If somebody had asked me at the time about my parents I would have said they were fine.

Things started to break down around 24, and by 26 I was in a total state. My autonomic nervous system was sounding the five alarm bell. My heart rate was elevated 24/7, my tongue was always dry, my eyes were red, I was irritable, I had trouble making eye contact, I was having to pee constantly, I had insomnia, and I was beginning suicidal ideation. I was detached from reality most of the time. I still had no idea what was happening.

Around that time, my brother was also breaking down. We both read a book around that time titled “The Defining Decade”. For whatever reason, that book convinced me that therapists aren’t quacks (I went to a therapist in college and he was useless).

The 2nd therapist I tried actually turned out to be a trauma-focused therapist. This was a good since a lot of therapists are ill-equipped to deal with trauma-related issues.

I quit my McJob that same week and focused 100% on recovering from what I knew at that point to be trauma. Still, all I knew is that my parents were not as good of people as I thought they were. I had $50k in the bank. Over the next 9 months I did nothing but trauma recovery. I picked up a job again later that year because I was running low. If it hadn’t been for that $50k I might not be alive today.

I muddled through years of confusion. I got on Lexapro to keep the panic attacks at bay. Every week my only goal was to survive and get back to that week’s therapy session. Every week I got a win. I lived for that win every week.

The experience of my trauma recovery has felt like feverishly bailing water out of a boat and hoping to row back to shore before I sink. Or like doing surgery on yourself with 12 hours left until sepsis.

My brother and I have helped each other put a lot of pieces together. We helped each other remember what happened, and we help each other figure out where a particular feeling might have come from.

I’m still pretty dissociated. I still have Dissociative Identify Disorder. The truth is, if I’m going to recover from this and actually have a good life and not just survive, I need to go a lot faster. I have been relying on my brother to help me process memories/emotions and it’s not sustainable. My current therapist is okay, and maybe I can keep it going with her. But it’s possible that I really I need a therapist who has seen the worst cases of DID. I need a therapist that is a dissociative symptoms veteran. I’m talking someone who has helped people recover from the worst stuff there is: Pedophilia (of course), satanic cults, being a child soldier, massive amounts of child abuse, etc. If anyone knows a therapist that fits the bill who lives in the USA, please post or message me.

[ertyu]

I don't have a therapist rec but "Toxic Parents" by Dr Susan Forward is a very good self-help book which discusses molestation, incest, and extreme abuse. It is older and a classic: one of the few self-help books that has survived the test of time and gets recommended years after its initial date of publication, and with reason. If you haven't yet worked through it, you might find it useful.

And this article is an interesting read for anyone who may feel othered by experiences of extreme abuse. The prevalence is higher than we like to admit. You are, sadly, very much not alone.

Also, while I can't point you to a particular video or lecture, Jaime Marich is someone who's done work on how to best use EMDR where dissociation is a factor. You might look her up on youtube. I believe she trains therapists as well; if I am indeed correct, she may have access to either recs or a database of US-based therapists who practice her approach. Googling how to get in touch with her and shooting her an email can't hurt. The worst that can happen is nothing, which leaves you where you are. The best that can happen is a referral link to the types of resources you need.

[Henry]

If anyone knows a therapist that fits the bill who lives in the USA, please post or message me.

One possibility is to attend a local sex anonymous (SA) meeting where you will interact others who have experienced what you have experienced. Most likely they will be in therapy and can give you recommendations. I wish you well.

[blink2ce]

It seems that my last post was timed at the same moment I had another breakthrough in speed.

At the beginning of this year, I saw all my dissociated "parts" for the first time. I took inventory. There are several at various ages, and some other non-age parts. But I still wasn't making the kind of progress I need.

A few weeks ago, I found out that I am now able to put my adult self "in front". This means that my adult self is the first part to process information from my senses. Now I can see much more easily which of my emotions are from the past, and which are from the present. I use the emotions that are out of place as a trailhead, and follow it in. I ask myself these four questions:

What physical sensation are you feeling right now?
What emotion is it?
When did this sensation happen before?
What about today makes it clear that that bad thing isn’t happening anymore?

This has gotten me very fast progress. I can get relief from a troublesome piece of trauma in the same day that I find out about it.

Working with my therapist is also a lot more efficient. I can just tell her what the issue is from my adult self instead of wandering around switching between parts.