The Work Community

I started working from home full time three months ago. Before I took this new position, I had been at a desk in a cubicle for 8 years. People talked about working from home in the same cryptic manner they talk about having a child. Unspecific statements like "It will be an adjustment." were common.

When I interviewed for the job, the interviewers would ask about my time management skills, and whether I would have a place to work that was free from distraction. These were my best guesses on what the adjustment would be. Check, time managment. Check, office upstairs. I was prepared.

Turns out my biggest adjustment was unrelated to time management or finding space away from my wife and toddling daughter. The biggest adjustment for me has been the mental shift. I don't have two communities that are exclusive anymore. I'm always at work, and I'm always at home. There is no line.

When I worked in a cubicle, talking about home while at work would be considered "unprofessional." Likewise, talking about work too much at home would be wrongfully "bringing my work home with me." The end result was two separate communities with two specific locations, with social pressure to keep them separate.

Now that I work at home, I still have colleagues, teammates, a boss, and a "virtual community" that I work with. I don't believe in virtual communities by the way. I argue that the purest form of community must share a common location which is frequently frequented. Being physically at home while I'm working keeps me from ever changing communities during the day. I never make the mental shift of being at work. I'm never "at work" anymore.

I love it. I love the adjustment. I don't mind always being at home. I don't mind letting go of that work location. It doesn't bother me at all. I wouldn't say that I'm used to it yet, 8 years of a cubicle is a long time, but I'm getting used to it. It feels a lot more natural to talk to my wife about a meeting with a client than it ever did at work.

Vulnerability in Community

To be vulnerable with someone is a scary thing. To carry secret burdens is a much scarier thing. Trying to determine when and how to be vulnerable requires a little bit of thought. This blog is going to process those thoughts out loud.

I believe that communities must share a location to actually be a community. If a person wants to count the number of communities that they are a part of, they simply need to count the number of locations that they frequent. If you recently moved out of your city, it's very easy to know how many communities you had. Simply count the number of going away parties you had before you left.

My wife and I have two communities currently, but we just added another a couple weeks ago. We started working out at a different church in town multiple days per week. We don't know anybody really, but we love the community already.

That said, I would not say that I'm vulnerable with any of my communities in Kentucky yet. We do have a lot of trust with people in our communities, and we feel very committed, but we don't necessarily share personal things very much. We don't necessarily hear a lot of personal things with other people either. I'm starting to believe that transparency in community is rare.

As a male, I think vulnerability is more challenging for me than for my wife. It seems that she is more comfortable talking with the women around her about more personal things. Perhaps this is a gender thing.

Talking about problems is a downer. It's not really a community building activity. Sharing a meal, telling funny stories, playing games, and watching sports are much safer and easier ways to build community than talking about depression, failures in marriage and parenting, or being angry deep inside. Staying positive is critical to keeping a community together.

Regional differences exist. Colorado had lots of vulnerability, and very little fun. Communities in Colorado share their problems, but have a harder time laughing together. In Kentucky and Alabama, we laugh together a lot, but rarely share personal things. I think maybe my northern friends have the best balance actually. Those mid-western states may be able to teach us all some things about community.

I'm still trying to decide what this all adds up to. I think vulnerability is important for long term health, but I'm also concerned that the wrong kind of vulnerability would just make the community uncomfortable and unhealthy.

Technology & Community

Is technology helpful to communities or harmful?

Technology advancement has had an impact on everything. The question is never whether technology has impacted something, but how. Communities are no different.

While many people look for impact of technology by focusing on the younger generation and the technology they use, I don't see this as the most important group of people or the most important technology. Instead of looking at cell phones and video games and teenagers, I prefer to look at the industrial revolution, and also the dramatic increase of intellectual jobs in the market. My reasoning is simple. Communities started breaking down before Nintendo, XBox, and iPhones ever existed. Put another way, I think the garage door opener had ten times more impact on the community than the Nintendo did.

Communities are people who know each other face to face, who trust one another, and rely on one another. Some define them as broader groups, but I'm specifically talking about smaller communities. These types of communities are rare in today's American culture, and I think the shift happened during the Baby Boomer generation, not during Generation X,Y, or millenials.

Technology like automobiles, tractors, combines, and airplanes seem to have impacted community much more dramatically than computers. Communities used to be self sufficient with crops, livestock, clothing tailors, and builders. Commuting to work was rare. The obvious example are the Amish and Mennonite communities who have resisted industrial technologies, but who clearly have tight knit communities.

Mennonite communities have a set of values that the industrial revolution took away from the rest of us. Sharing things, and depending on your neighbors is a good thing. Committing to a location is valuable.

While we may not be able to undo the industrial revolution, I do think we can try to undo the independent way of thinking it brought us to.

A World Without Community

Society at large has the power to encourage or discourage behavior. Laws are passed to protect individual rights, individual freedoms. On the other hand, a society at large has very loose moral rules. In the United States, the constitution does not address our morality, just our rights. It speaks to the value of human life, but not to the character of a man or woman.

A small community, on the other hand, is able to hand stories down from generation to generation. It is able to teach moral behaviors, and is concerned with character. It respects the individual rights outlined by the laws of the land, but also is able to uphold and encourage a moral code.

A community knows itself and knows its place in a way that is impossible for a public (a nation, say, or a state). A community does not come together by a covenant, by a conscientious granting of trust. It exists by proximity, by neighborhood; it knows face to face, and it trusts as it knows. It learns, in the course of time and experience, what and who can be trusted.

Wendell Berry uses "public" and community in opposition to each other often, but really they are not separate. The important thing I think is to realize the role that a community plays as a part of the larger public. It provides the moral code. It establishes how a person behaves, and how men and women relate to one another. 

Berry on Community

I am convinced that a lack of community causes many problems in our culture. My thoughts on this are evolving, but have been heavily influenced lately by Wendell Berry, an author from Kentucky who was recommended to me by a friend because of Berry's interest in the local community.

Berry takes my concerns about lack of community a step further than I have been able to take them, and he provides a framework of language that is quite helpful. I do not see Berry as infallible on the subject. Actually, I disagree with many of his perspectives emphatically. But he has propelled my thinking to a different level, and for that I am incredibly grateful.

I will post two or three blogs on his essay, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, soon. In the meantime, here is an excerpt from this essay that I love.

...community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature.(Community of course, is an idea that can extend itself beyond the local, but it only does so metaphorically. The idea of a national or global community is meaningless apart from the realization of local communities.)

A community identifies itself by an understood mutuality of interests. But it lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness. If it hopes to continue on as a community it will wish to--and will have to--encourage respect for all its members, human and natural. It will encourage respect for all stations and occupations. Such a community has the power--not invariably but as a rule--to enforce decency without litigation. It has the power, that is, to influence behavior. And it exercises this power not by coercion or violence, but by teaching the young and by preserving stories and songs that tell (among other things) what works and does not work in a given place." 

 More soon...

(Thanks to Elena for the recommendation on this essay by the way. I am grateful.)

Community: The problem of abstractness

Failing to understand the origin of the food that we eat is more than just a health hazard, it's an economic problem.

As the cost of food rises around the world, consumers are beginning to search for alternatives to the grocery store. The search through farmers markets leads us to an interesting discovery; the land that we live on cannot grow all of the food that we eat.

Believe it or not, the salmon from the grocery store do not swim in the lakes of Missouri, nor does sugar cane grow in Colorado, nor coffee anywhere in North America. In fact, the land directly surrounding most of our cities could not sustain the foods that the cities eat.

This situation not only creates an abstractness to the food that we eat, in that we know very little about our foods quality, but it also leaves us without an alternative source. If we knew 3 dairy farmers, we would have an alternative source to milk. As it stands, we only know the grocery stores, leaving us very few options if the price of milk were to change like the price of petroleum.

I have no reason to believe that this will cause any immediate problems, but the abstractness increases the risk. My thoughts on this are still developing. More to come.