PART 1: Kings and Queens of a Crumbling Castle

What a time to be alive and be middle class!

In the old days, if it were strawberry season you ate strawberries. If someone had shot an elk with a bow and arrow, you ate elk. Most days though, you just ate yams. Day after day, nothing but yams.

Never before in world history has 5pm rolled around and people asked themselves “What do I want to eat tonight?” Do I want beef, chicken, ham, cheese, pasta, pizza, salad, rice, tilapia, Stove Top stuffing, Lucky Charms, boiled eggs, baked beans, carry out, delivery, dine in?

Do I want Chinese food? If so, what kind of Chinese food? Sichuan, Cantonese, pulled noodles, braised pork, fried rice, general Tzo’s, chop suey, hot pot?

Or… do I want to go to one of those China Buffets where grilled cheese, bad sushi, and soft serve ice cream are the most popular items on the menu and no one even bats an eye?

If the ancients could see how we live they would mistake us for gods. Our angels – Siri and Alexa – fulfilling our every desire, carrying out our heavenly commands:

“Play me some laid-back jazz!”

“Bring me Phil Jackson’s Lakers memoir!”

“What will the weather be three days from now in Albuquerque?”

“Calculate the fastest route to the Dominoes off of Woodward!”

Our entertainment would put the medieval kings of Europe and the ancient emperors of China to shame! They had a guy on retainer who could play the same three songs on a flute. Sitting around a fire, drinking their miserable wine (clearly no match for the craft brews we have), listening to those same damn 3 songs.

At the time those emperors thought they’d arrived at the pinnacle of luxury, but I just binged watched Breaking Bad (even though I’ve seen it before).

Ahhhh! Life is good…

No one has recently tried to crush my skull with a rock over a boundary dispute. I take hours a week to write this blog, rather than gather berries or firewood. At night I sleep in a house, in a bed, on a mattress that Qin Shi Huang or Charlemagne would have conquered half of Palestine to get their hands on.

We are truly the kings and queens of our castles. We have everything in such abundance – time, sustenance, comfort, leisure, safety. I honestly doubt whether the Garden of Eden itself was as comfy as our lives now.

***

Despite the excess comfort and entertainment, the pandemic has been challenging. The stay at home orders and sense of isolation have made many of our minds start to slip. I’ve noticed this with myself and others, a mental fuzziness that’s hard to define. Like your mind is not as sharp, like you want to sleep more than usual. It’s the effects of being alone more often.

Doesn’t modern life feel so lonely sometimes? We are like kings and queens sitting all alone in our castles, our stuff piled high, yet not-quite able to distract ourselves from the elephant in the room.

A previous post [https://www.drewfralick.com/writings/itsgood] explained how origin stories can affect your mental health. In the Judeo-Christian origin narrative God created with intentionality and provided everything the world needed: time, space, weather, food. God looked at it all and said, “It’s good.”

The only thing of which God said, “It’s Not Good” was for humans to be alone (Gen 1:18).

From the beginning isolation was named as bad. The testing of this hypothesis has been unfolding for over a year now.

At times the past year has felt like one of those old-school psychology experiments from the 1960s. The research question being: “If humans are given everything they could ever need and want, minus social interaction, what will happen?”

The results have been coming out since last spring.

It’s not good to be alone, perhaps the understatement of the year. Like a warning on your fancy shirt saying, ‘Hand Wash Only’, we ignore this instruction at our own peril because humans are inherently social creatures. Our brains start to regress with sustained isolation. We require interaction and community. COVID-19 exposed the urgency of this issue.

***

Yet, do we not still feel as gods walking the face of the Earth? There is an expressed desire for things to “Get back to normal”, which is code-speak for “Let’s go back to doing things the way we were before.” The old way of doing life. After all, we are the queens and kings of our castles.

Perhaps if we build the walls to the castle a little higher we’ll be able to sustain this lifestyle indefinitely.

Or maybe the walls will begin to resemble our own self-made prison. The same thing keeping others out is the same thing locking us in.

(PART 2 Below the picture)

PART 2: Intentional Community

When people are faced with adversity, community will begin to form to counteract those circumstances. The more extreme the difficulties, the tighter the community that is formed.

Life in Shanghai could be very isolating. Not only for the foreigners, who were away from their familiar culture and families, but also for the Chinese nationals, many of whom were from other parts of the country. In the swill of a city with 27 million inhabitants, it was easy to get lost in the sea of people or feel a rootless anonymity. The phrase “all alone in a crowd” was the daily experience for many people in the city.

Despite constantly being surrounded by people and stimulation, the risk of isolation was high. It was within this context that we sought out opportunities for intentional community.

What is intentional community? For some of you my description of it will be as obvious as the nose on your face. I will be describing a way of life that is weaved into your day to day existence. For others, you may be intrigued or perhaps even disturbed by the of idea intentional community. It may feel threatening or scary, you might be tempted to use terms like ‘cult’ or ‘commune’ to discredit the concept. You’ll draw up in your mind some of the darkest examples of intentional community – the violent abolition of private property, the Branch Davidian, the Netflix documentary Wild, Wild Country.

In reality, intentional community is far more mundane and challenging than the above examples. Intentional community is a group of people who choose to share life and resources together. Examples include families, religious groups, gangs, political groups, and clubs, though often these tend to share life but not resources together (in the American context).

During our nine years in Shanghai, we lived in intentional community twice. The first time was with our friends Daniel and Haesook. They were from Germany and South Korea, respectively, and had also been in the city for many years. They had been praying about and desiring intentional community, and heard from a mutual friend that we were as well. We shared rent, groceries, and utilities. It was wonderful because there was always someone around. It was also challenging at times because there was always someone around.

The advantages of community living are numerous: far lower economic pressure, way less loneliness and isolation, and safety in numbers (to name a few). But it comes with many challenges as well, sacrifices great and small which must be made to hold it all together. This loss of total privilege and independence is likely what makes intentional community a rarer sight in our western context.

One of my favorite memories from living with Haesook and Daniel is a Christmas party we had one year. The house was full of people and we had singing as well as a reading from the Christmas story. The songs and reading were done four times, first in Korean, then Chinese, English, and German. It was a beautiful expression of the oneness of humanity.

Our second time living in intentional community was as the resident assistants at a safe house for women coming out of abusive situations. This experience was far more structured than the house with Daniel and Haesook. There were rules, rhythms, and chores to fulfill for everyone who came to live there. The women we were living with all had been traumatized, and what they needed most was rest, rhythm, and safety. Intentional community promotes all three of these things.

They could find rest because the group shared their psychological burdens and we were all able to look out for each other. There were certainly challenges living in this community – the petty arguments over who ate who’s groceries to the major personality clashes. We all had to give up a piece of ourselves, our independence, prerogatives, and preferences, to accommodate the group, but in return found the goodness of living life together.

***

A friend of mine described the feeling in March 2020 as apocalyptic. I think he was trying to say it looked like a scene out of the movie I Am Legend, but the original meaning of the word applies too. Apocalypse simply means ‘revealing what’s underneath’. In that sense we’ve been through an apocalypse and it revealed and reminded us of several important truths.

First, we are all interconnected. Our castle walls are an illusion. What happens to the shopkeeper in Wuhan affects the farmer in Washington state. There’s no way to fully disconnect from the world of people.

Also, rugged independence is not the optimal way to do life. Our time on this planet is meant to be shared in community – whether it be a family, a bowling league, people from your platoon, or a cluster of closely connected neighbors.

Finally, it’s not good to be alone.

This last year has at times seemed like a giant clinical experiment. What happens when individuals have all their needs cared for while having little connection with other people? The answer: we start to slip and go a little bit crazy. (Or a lot crazy)

My bold prediction for the next 10 years: we will be poorer in our bank accounts but richer in community. The castle walls might start to fade a bit, but there will be people to share it with. Instead of asking “What do I want to eat tonight?” We may ask “What meal will we all share this evening?” (Probably yams). And we can bring the flute player back, the one who played for the kings of Europe and the emperors of China. We’ll have him play those same damn 3 songs, but this time for the whole neighborhood.

It certainly won’t be heaven on earth, but I bet it will be better than we have it now. It might even be a bright drewtopian future.

It's not good...