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The notion of the nuclear family still heavily shapes our understanding of a desirable social structure. While I don’t doubt the importance and value of the traditional family unit, an increasing body of research is telling us that access to friends and other non-kin relationships is just as – if not more – essential to leading a fulfilling life.
There are many modern day pressures that make attaining the idyllic family life difficult. Balancing the expectations that come with family and work often means that hanging out with friends is not very high on our priority list.
In this insightful conversation, Ezra Klein and Prof. Sheila Liming connect the growing ‘loneliness epidemic’ with the fact that people are much less likely to simply spend time together outside their workplaces and family units. There are many interesting parts worth highlighting; here are just a few:
The way we look at housing and real estate often sets the default against community and for isolation. We take pride in owning large, private spaces, ideally with a generous gap between us and our neighbours. “A lot of what it comes down to is fantasies of control – that it feels like we are more in control when we can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to certain kinds of interactions. Whereas if we are living in close proximity with other people, we have to cede control. … But that itself comes with its own rewards. It reorients us towards other priorities: community, having those people in our lives, social situations and, yes, hanging out.”
Unsurprisingly, class/wealth changes the way we experience and create social structures. The richer parts of society are able to buy their way out of the limits and pressures of the family unit: “The rich find a way out of this by basically extending their family structures with the help of money. So they pay for child care, and they pay for cleaning help, and they pay for other people who become attached to the family unit and help run the whole family unit. But if you don’t have that money, then you are left with the expectations of what a family is supposed to look like without all the extra resources and all the extra help. And I think that’s a burden that falls very uniquely upon the middle class.”
Liming proposes a more contemporary interpretation of the family “where the family structure is seen as a little bit more porous and open, as inviting to outsiders and to people beyond. … Hanging out with people outside of that immediate family cluster [is seen] as a kind of release from the claustrophobia of the family environment.” In other words, access to friends and other non-kin relationships can act like a pressure valve. It not only broadens our social support network, it also offers a multitude of interactions that help negate the social isolation felt in the digital age.
The podcast episode covers a lot more – like the social costs of wearing headphones and earbuds in public or how technology has enabled us to avoid the social awkwardness and rejection inherent in building community.
Liming’s case for investing more time in friends/friendships reminded me of Adrienne Matei’s Atlantic piece last month titled Live Closer to Your Friends in which she argues that proximity to friends should play a more crucial role in deciding where we live:
“Many people are prepared to move for a new job, to be with a romantic partner, or even just for an adventure. Moving to be closer to buddies should be no different. Friends are not incidental to a good life; they’re essential to one. So why not shorten the distance between you and them?” – Kai
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Apps & Sites
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Open-source knowledge base
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A reader sent in this alternative to last week’s recommendation of Slab. Outline offers similar features for managing and collaborating on large documentations. Next to its hosted product, Outline also offers a free, self-hosted, open-source version. Friends of DD enjoy a 15% discount on paid plans for one year.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Dual mobile cam recording
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macOS video editing software Detail recently released a new iOS app that turns on both front and back facing iPhone cameras, so you can record videos on both simultaneously.
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Bookmark & content manager
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With Fabric you can build collections of bookmarks, files, but also notes and excerpts of a website. You can ‘capture’ specific sections of an article, comment on or add notes to websites, all of which is fully searchable once saved on your ‘drive’.
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I hesitated to include this tool because avoiding paywalls is not exactly how you support good journalism. However, used sparingly (and it’s cumbersome enough to be used occasionally only) it helps me discover articles on sites that I rarely visit and that I may end up promoting in DD. 12ft essentially accesses Google’s cached version of the site, thereby circumventing the paywall.
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Worthy Five: Eddie Ahn
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Five recommendations by environmental justice lawyer and cartoonist Eddie Ahn
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A question worth asking:
‘Who am I accountable to?’ is a question I often ask myself in my environmental justice work. It’s not easy to create good environmental policies, and I often understand my own accountability is to hyperlocal communities disproportionately burdened by pollution and climate change.
A concept worth understanding:
The speed and scale of climate change are sobering concepts, especially when understood in the context of the policies we need to implement in the next decade, and the consensus we need to get from diverse communities.
A book worth reading:
I initially appreciated George Orwell’s Animal Farm for presenting itself as a simple fable about farm animals who band together to create their own utopian paradise, but its storytelling style and themes make for a surprisingly complex meditation on authoritarianism, generosity, and greed.
A recipe worth trying:
I make a simplified Ratatouille Pasta, which can be adapted from this written recipe by Bon Appetit and this YouTube video by Honeysuckle. When travelling for work, I mostly eat heavy food, and I find myself needing this veggie-centric recipe when I return home!
An activity worth doing:
Try doodling something different each day. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurately drawn or in a particular style. As a self-taught cartoonist, I really enjoy exploring different subjects, and quick daily doodles help me push myself to think creatively in different ways.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Eddie Ahn in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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The politics of interdependence
Under the moniker ‘The Care Collective’, several authors put together a manifesto that positions care at the centre of solving our many crises. In a world where carelessness reigns, the manifesto puts forth a vision for society with care as its key organising principle. “This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more ‘promiscuous care’. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.”
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The radical power of killing time
Spending ‘unstructured’ time with people outside of work or family has all but disappeared from our lives. Simply enjoying the company of friends or even strangers without a specific goal is not something most of us have or make time for. The author Sheila Liming connects our lack of ‘hanging out’ to the pervasive loneliness experienced in Western society. “Starting with the assumption that play is to children as hanging out is to adults, Liming makes a brilliant case for the necessity of unstructured social time as a key element of our cultural vitality.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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What makes biking dangerous is all the cars. What makes the bus so slow is all the cars. What makes it so everything is too far away to walk is all the space we have to reserve for the cars.
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Food for Thought
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The metamorphosis of Paris from a city of noise and smog into an active transport haven is nothing short of miraculous. I really enjoyed reading about the effects (both good and bad) of such radical urban transformation. “In 2020 [the mayor] renovated the Right Bank’s main east-west artery, the Rue de Rivoli. It has gone from six lanes of traffic (four moving, two parked) to one for taxis and buses, with the rest a bike path serving 8,500 riders a day. (In a pinch, the bike path is wide enough to serve as a traffic-free route for emergency vehicles; an analysis recently showed that this has helped the city lower fire response times to under seven minutes for the first time in more than a decade.)”
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An excellent conversation between Ezra Klein and Prof. Sheila Liming about the ‘loneliness epidemic’ and why spending time outside of family and work has become so difficult and rare. What would it look like to reconfigure our world to make social connection easier for all of us? “This widespread loneliness is often analogized to a disease, an epidemic. But that label obscures something important: Loneliness in America isn’t merely the result of inevitable or abstract forces, like technological progress; it’s the product of social structures we’ve chosen – wittingly or unwittingly – to build for ourselves.”
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With my mum in her seventies now, I think a lot more about how our society treats the elderly, and how pervasive loneliness and other mental health issues are. This earnest account of an eighty-year-old woman dealing with loneliness offers genuine reflection for what may await many of us in the final chapter of our lives. “I think that we yearn for perfect peace, which doesn’t mean being in perfect solitude, or comatose, or brain dead, but for peace in the heart – a peaceful heart in the midst of the multitudes, tumult, chaos, violence, sorrow, and the beauty of everyday life. We can never have that peace, except in the work of art or the sunset, but instead, we have intimations of it, and that is why we feel sadness.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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In his series Dark Matter photographer Zac Henderson uses a macro lense to capture the magnetic forces around iron filings. “By exposing iron filings to an invisible magnetic field, the work imagines dark matter particles and their interactions with normal matter through gravity, as seen from a higher dimension, or bulk, in which both are visible. The resulting forms are dynamic, abstract sculptures that celebrate the wonders of the known and unknowable forms of nature.” Here is a short ‘making of’ video.
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In DIS·POSED photographer Trevor Traynor reminds us of what remains of the pandemic. “These photos are a daily reminder of the loss, the hardship, the political divide, and the surreality that has overtaken all of our lives. These simple pieces of plastic, cloth and paper symbolize so much more than the virus – they represent the metaphor that united and defined us all in 2020. Disposable masks and gloves have now joined the pantheon of styrofoam cups and plastic straws as our unintended legacy.” A limited edition newsprint is available in his shop.
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Askly is a brand that combines strong typography, character design and hand-drawn colouring effects to create a friendly, approachable brand with a recognisable identity.
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The typeface ‘friends’ Riegla (sans) & Riegraf (serif) make for a beautiful combination that I’d love to use in an editorial project. The microsite is also really well done.
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Notable Numbers
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Last year, China added more than 51 gigawatts of small-scale (‘distributed’) solar power. This is more than the total clean energy additions (of small-scale and utility solar and wind) from the US, Germany, and the UK combined.
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If UK delivery companies shifted to cargo bikes instead of diesel vans for first and last-mile deliveries, it would save taxpayers over £4bn/year in public health and other services. The Department for Transport has calculated that 33% of all urban deliveries could be done by cargo or e-cargo bikes.
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A recent study found that 24% of our food’s carbon emissions come from food that is lost in supply chains or wasted by consumers. Of this, 15% comes from losses in the supply chain. The other 9% comes from food thrown away by retailers and consumers.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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