(I recorded an audio version of this article above for those who prefer to listen rather than read. You’ll be able to tell that the audio was recorded in my “world-class” sound studio in my garage, with the only finest audio equipment available.)
A friend asked me the other day why I write “Build The Village” and what I hope to accomplish by doing so. I figure an article is a good way to answer.
Reason #1: What a time to be alive!
There’s a lot of doom and gloom and problems out there. But I write “Build The Village” because I genuinely believe this is a great time to be alive.
We could've been born in some boring, stuffy time; with nothing to do but follow a long list of rules. But we’ve gotten rid of most of the rules.
We could’ve been born in a desperate time with nothing to do but engage in a daily struggle to hold off starvation. But we live in a post-scarcity world.
So, those do not seem to be our times, and those do not seem to be our problems. Instead, our time, our problem is to figure out just how much “utopia” we can truly handle.
And I see that as an enormous opportunity for our generation to be intentional and build for the future.
You never know what “the times” are building toward until later, but we seem to be in a critical transitional phase; a pause and take a breath moment. Over the last 200 or so years we’ve radically changed society and advanced technology and yet, there’s this growing awareness that not all the progress and advancement was good, that we need to check ourselves, that we need to pull back or be more intentional about how we let progress dictate our lives.
What an amazing privilege it is to choose which conveniences, technologies, and securities we’ll forego for our own good.
While there’s a professional class of online problem describers sucking up most of the bandwidth, happily wallowing in the problems our times create, like a pig in the mud, I prefer a different story: I see you and I as having extraordinary agency within our own spheres and I want others, particularly men, to whom our “utopia” has been most cruel, to see that.
“Let every man believe he is the architect and builder of his own life.” - Heber J. Grant.
When our choices become destructive, it’s up to us change them toward a better life, even in the absence of broad support.
This is why I wrote posts like:
Living With Radioactive Waste (on smartphone addiction)
Reason #2: The Power of Community is Our Birthright
When teaching about the power of community in real life, I often use the analogy of a nuclear bomb. (Yes, I’m quite subtle with my analogies.)
A nuclear bomb works by splitting a lot of atoms. When the atom splits a force is unleashed and when you have enough of those unleashed together in a chain reaction, the combined force results in a devastating nuclear explosion.
We built our “utopia” by doing a similar thing to communities and relationships: tearing them apart and harnessing the tremendous power inside. Every large organization you can think of, be it a business or a government agency, tore apart some aspect of old communal living, harnessed the collective power of millions upon millions of relationships and turned it into a law, a regulation, a product or a service. The result has sent shock waves through time and has had devastating consequences on our social fabric.
Power has accrued to those massive institutions and local, personal power has diminished. Masculine power has all but disappeared.
Where people used to exist as particles of a communal atom, we’re now “radical individuals”, freer to pursue whatever we want, but lost and without purpose because our primary relationships are with brands, careers, big box stores, apps, celebrities, technologies, fandoms, etc; and mediated not by the village elder, or a respected family member, or a family tradition or even by some bully or boss you despise, but by screens, overstretched, too big to succeed institutions and ever expanding scope creep.
The absurdist future of our “utopia” is the humans you see in the movie Wall-E: rich, well-fed humans yes, but also disempowered, infantilized, agency-less humans; captured, floating blobs of mostly blubber.
The good news is this is reversible.
I write “Build The Village” because I believe we can take back a lot of this communal power, and put ourselves back into the orbit of other people, by exercising our agency to live differently. It’s not easy and you can’t do it alone. It takes a village and that’s why I write about it. I can’t be a community by myself. And neither can you. Again, I believe men feel the absence of meaningful community most keenly and I’m most interested in helping us rebuild meaningful fraternity.
This is why I wrote posts like:
Reason #3: The Bar For Cultural Creation Has Never Been Lower
Imagine it’s the early 1950’s and a TV arrives in your house for the first time. It’s a tiny screen, with a poor black and white image and even poorer sound quality compared to what we have today - but it was revolutionary for its time. Impossibly captivating.
And every decade afterward saw new impossibly captivating advancements in entertainment and storytelling technology and it should be little wonder that mass media became mass. We couldn’t look away. And family story time, communal music, local entertainment, etc. was forgotten, left in the dust.
But the time of awe at what the screen can do has passed. We’ve entered instead into a time of exhausted cultural addictions. You look at the screen not because you’re excited about what they’ll come up with next but because there’s nothing else to do and you hate every moment of it.
The crumbling quality of popular culture, the fall of the Hollywood blockbuster, the lifeless AI quality of new music or the vapidness of social media are not tragedies to mourn or reasons for moral panic. Instead, we should see it all as a once in a civilization creative opportunity, gifted to us from God.
The bar has never been lower. In the past your competition was staggering. Today, it doesn’t exist. There hasn’t been this much room for new ritual, new rites of passage, new stories and local innovation since before your great-grandparents were born.
We have agency, we can use it to empower ourselves. And I write “Build The Village” because one of the most powerful choices you can make is to rebuild and own your culture; starting with how you spend your time with family and friends, and building out from there.
This is why I wrote posts like:
Telling the Truth (About Dating)
What I Hope To Accomplish
Writing is an enormously clarifying effort. I’ve learned a lot in this weekly exercise.
But mostly, I hope that writing leads to real world action. Not just for me, but for you… we might as well make the internet useful!
I don’t know you, but I write to help men like you “build a village”.
I write to help men find the now hidden paths to meaningful connection.
I write to help men build a delightful family and communal culture.
I write to show men that these things are possible, desirable and empowering.
I write to help you and me stop, ponder and be intentional about how we design our lives.
Everyone sees the problems, but there is potential. And as with all potentials, there’s no guarantee. Only opportunities to try, to iterate, to fail, to turn around now and again and to push through to glorious discovery.
But if you ache for an age of exploration, if you feel the tug to go on an adventure, you’ll find it on the path to fraternity, to the village and to community.
If you want a map, or a step by step procedure of how you can get there, well, I’m sorry, that’s not how discovery works. No one had a map of America in 1491. And no one yet has a clear picture of what community looks like in the 21st century. But we’re going to find it. And I hope you join me.
What’s Coming?
Most “Build The Village” articles will always be free because I want as many people as possible to read and contribute. But going forward, I will make certain articles and features available for paid subscribers only. I do this because I greatly appreciate and feel indebted to the support paid subscribers give to me and my family of 8 and to this effort of rebuilding connection and community in our lives.
In the near future, I’ll begin to create:
more how-to descriptions for men and their families
interviews with other “pioneers” and success stories
deep dives into topics of interest
Q&A’s
and whatever else makes sense along this journey
As a thank you, I’ll send annual subscribers a signed copy of my book, “Only the Weird Will Survive”. If you want to support this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s cheaper and will impact your life way more than any streaming service.
Additionally, I know there’s something special about coming together to discuss your vision with someone else: energy that creates clarity, action and commitment.
To that end, I’m available to consult with you on the specifics of building your community.